Too Hot to Knit

Maybe it's not too hot to knit, full stop, but it is far to hot to knit on the Highland Triangle. I haven't taken a picture of it - it's the same but bigger. So I've been thinking about what I could knit in 80 degree temperatures. I thought I might have a go at the "Two End Knitting". It's best to use a Z-plied yarn, so I went on a hunt.

Could anyone credit that, of all the yarn in the house (and the "small storage solution" in the hall is a miniscule amount in the great scheme of things), there does not appear to be one single ball, skein, partial ball or even short length of Z-plied yarn? I can't believe it, either. It stopped me in my tracks. Does this mean I'll have to buy more yarn? No, no, please - not that!

During the hunt for said yarn I came across this:



7 25g balls of Paton's 2-ply 100% Baby wool, bought eons ago in the charity shop (aka "The Boutique"). No yardage mentioned on the ball band but a quick call to Nicky at Shipston Needlecrafts and she came up with 240yards per ball. So that's 1,680 yards and as this seems long enough and thin enough to a) keep me going for a while and b) not cause heat-stroke when I knit it, I thought I might as well do something with it. There are no babies in my ambit at the moment (and there won't be if I have anything to do with it!) so it's not going to be baby stuff. What about that old favourite, the shawl?

I thought about Stephanie's Snowdrop Shawl but then decided it was a bit "baby" so I turned to Sharon Miller (who's never let me down yet) and found this:



It's a free pattern for a Bird's Eye Shawl. I'm just working up the energy to start it.

I also found lots of other treasures during the hunt including this mystery yarn:



Eight balls of anonymous crepe 2-ply, cream, appears to be wool. See that ball-band? It's completely and utterly blank!

I also found this:



350g of 60% cotton/40% linen, slightly slubby and a lovely terracotta colour. Bought in another "boutique" for a song. I feel a little summer top coming on.

Daisy asked in the comments about joining cotton yarn. Well, I'm sure Daisy has realised by now that cotton is the devil's work but if you have to join it I'd simply drop the old yarn and pick up the new yarn and continue knitting using the new yarn. (Assuming this is at the end of a row, I'd then twist the ends around each other and weave them into the edges in opposite directions on the wrong side.) You can also do this in the middle of a row or round. The first stitch will be a tad loose, and you'll have to even up the tension later and then weave in the ends. You couldn't do better than look at the directions for weaving in ends in Knitty. In that article Elizabeth Zimmermann's method of joining yarn is described. She would work just one stitch with both the old and the new yarns and weave in the ends later. She claimed that one stitch didn't add much bulk. I suppose it depends on the thickness of the yarn to start with and you might need to be careful about the placement of your join. You could always do a little swatch and give it a go first. (I love advising people to do things that I would never do in a million years.)

On to the start of Bird's Eye.