Package #4: Grandaddy - Sumday, Fiery Furnaces - Gallowsbird's Bark
Haven't listened to Grandaddy yet because I'm hooked on the Fiery Furnaces. I've been waiting for this fix for a while. Most excellent.
Package #5 (or part 1 of the slightly late birthday present from my bro): Norsk Strikkedesign and The Knitter's Book of Finishing Techniques.
A HA!! Now I know why my sweater has been such a BITCH. Because it's annoying as hell to do two stranded knitting on the purl side, and you're not supposed to!!! The patterns in Norsk Strikkedesign are all done in the round with steeks. BRILLIANT!!! That would make things so much easier. Wow.
Ok, I love this book already. The garter stitch jacket looks pretty easy (relatively speaking), and if my wool dying experiment with K goes well, I'll be making a modified version of this. Probably just with reds and white pinstripes. The edging is black velvet or velveteen. It's pretty.
But what I really want to make is the embroidered jacket which really doesn't look that hard. I'd make it with the alpaca/wool blend yarn that will hopefully arrive tomorrow. See, the jacket looks complicated, but it's actually done with two colors at a time (mostly dark green and gold except at the edges where there's the white/red strips and the blue/green scalloped looking pattern). The rest of the coloring is embroidered on afterwards. So the actual knitting isn't so bad. And now that I know about this whole steeking thing, it seems so much easier than the sweater I've been working on!
In fact, I'm wondering if I should just abandon that sweater... I was making such progress though. Hm.
