A Reluctant Muse

I'm in sooooooo much trouble for this. But doesn't it look perfect on her?

Thanks, babe. I love that you wear what I make. Grateful and please please please spare my life.

Colinette pattern Oreneta in Giotto yarn, sunrise color way. More at this post.

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Cultural Digressions, Oreneta Tee

Poor Chester.

Not only was this picture taken at the ass-crack of dawn, on a Sunday, but the sweater shows a little too much decolletage.

(When does a Golden finally slow down? When he gets up after you on a Sunday!)

And that pink thing is still going on.

Anyway, proper pictures below. This is a Colinette pattern from the booklet Catalan. The yarn is Giotto, and I have the Sunrise colorway. This is my second of these t-shirts, and it is probably the most functional Giotto pattern for Giotto, after adaptations.

I LOVE Giotto. It's the yarn that got me back into knitting. the colors are like candy, like chocolate, like crack, and the textures you can make when you knit are glorious. The yarn is a like a two-lane road: one side is cotton, and no sheen, the other is rayon and provides sweet little glints of shine in little pebbly stitches and nice long stretches of glow in longer dropped stitches.

But Giotto deserves its own posting. This one is about the pattern "Oreneta" in the Catalan pattern book by Colinette.

I've made this T a couple times and plan on making it a couple times more. The second time I knit it I made the body in the round instead of as two panels, and finished the top front and top back separately.

Reasons I like Oreneta:

• Pattern is fairly easy to read. I'd say it's a great project immediately upon graduating from scarf or hat school. There's enough detailing to make a pattern reader learn to pay attention while the stitching itself is fairly easy. So if you make a mistake in your counting, it's not totally crazy making to look at the stitches and figure out what you might have done wrong. (Ask me how I know about this...)
• The finishing is pretty forgiving - the colors of the yarn and texture of the reverse stocking stitch very nicely hide awkward first-time, learning it on your own finishing. I sew the sleeves on using a very simple, very dense version of the satin stitch. (Hate to swatch, hate to finish... but I swear I am getting better and more disciplined at both.)
  
• Giotto is easy to care for in THIS pattern - I machine wash, then depending on how much the garment has stretched (and Giotto stretches A LOT), I air-dry flat or on a hanger, OR throw it in the dryer.
  

OK. I'm late for work but here are a few pictures of the shirt as it looks off of Chester:



and


Detailing around the neck and of a side seam where I sewed on a sleeve - you can barely see the stitching - and I wasn't super anal about it! Nice, huh?

Time to go to work... see ya!

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More prettiness...

So - whadaya think?  I got this funky app to watermark my pix. Typedrawing.

Yarn is my beloved Colinette Giotto in Raspberry. Pottery from some little shop in Avignon (ah, Avignon, sur le pont...)

Of course, I still love mahjohngg.  and knitting.  but the competition is getting fierce!

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Pretty

So. This is one of many UFOs (UnFinished Objects) hanging around in my conscience, project bin, to-do list. It's the yarn (brand: Colinette, yarn: Giotto, colorway: raspberry) that lured me back into knitting a few years ago. It was in a sale bin (how? why? does it matter?) at Knit+Stitch=Bliss had it at deep discount and I stared at it (because even at discount, Colinette is pricey, at least here in these United States) and suffered my first case of yarn sticker shock.

Yarn lust had struck. The next day, I went to the yarn shop at lunch and coveted. I googled. I researched what I could do with 1 skein of Giotto. (Not enough.) Did they have 2 skeins? They did!... And there went the 50% discount and thus began Serious Yarn Addiction.

But admit it... Pretty.

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