I decided the best way to thank Rachel for the gift of her time and her wrists Saturday was to pay it forward: by knitting up and giving away the qiviut fiber she’d spun up and then had insisted on giving back to me. That had been on my good-intentions list for awhile.
Procrastination, however, had not cured me of being a little afraid of touching it. One must experiment, one must frog a little, when playing with a new yarn of a very definite length and no more. One must see what kind of width vs length vs pattern I could get out of it.
Well, now I really owed her, so today I’m here to say that Rachel’s superfine handspinning of dryer-lint-fine qiviut is something that will stand up to being (oh so very gently) ripped out. It did fuzz a bit when I did. Just those first few rows–umm, wrong needle size. Didn’t like. Try again. Um, wrong stitch count, won’t have enough.
I thought.
I expected to just whiz through that small ball in no time. It has been thwarting my expectations in wonderful ways. Out of 24 g, I really have 16 still left? Really? Unblocked, I’ve got 20.5″ already–I was expecting to get a cowl’s worth but instead it’s going to come out an actual scarf. (I didn’t knit it in the round out of sheer optimism. Definitely paid off.)
Details: the lace pattern of the main body of the Michelle shawl from “Wrapped in Comfort,” plus an extra stitch each edge for a solid selvedge. I cast on 27 stitches on size 4.5mm.
I bought the fiber hand-dehaired from the owner of the animal. This yarn is so exquisitely soft, the best qiviut can be, and oh, it is so warm. Can you just picture having your own Alaskan Musk Ox to comb the undercoat from? Or even making socks out of this stuff to keep your feet really really warm on the ice? (But the idea of wearing holes in it! No thank you–I’ll knit my own holes in and call it lace.)
Because–Frankly, my dear, I don’t qiviut a darn.