Wooly not

I am sensitive to wool. I know, shocking! But it's true. It's ruff, itches and makes my skin crawl. For a knitter who loves to knit wool, this is sad. However, some yarns are okay on my skinny-skin-skin. For an example, Franny knit out of Rowan's Big Wool, should be fine. We'll see though. It might make my skin crawl! [glup] I did love knitting her up though!*

I recently bought some pretty Rowan Chunky Print in cream to make Roxie out of Rowan's Big Just Got Bigger. Confused? Check out Jen's Roxie. AWESOME, isn't it? I can see myself just loving this sweater. However. It looks like it would make me itch. I wasn't sure though, so bought the yarn anyway. (De Nile is really just a river in Egypt, right?) I planned to swatch the yarn and think on it a few days to see if it would really be okay or not. Well, lemme tell you. Even if I thought it'd be just fine as a sweater on me bear skin, I wanted to toss this project into the back of my closet, only to be seen one day when I move. Would you like to know why? Because I cannot get gauge. I'm a tight knitter. I look at this as a good thing. I can say things like "Knitting's tight, so I knit Tight." Cool, huh? (Just smile at me.) For me to get a gauge I have to scrap the size US 11 needles suggested. I tried a swatch on 13s. Closer to gauge, but the swatch looked like ass. That's right, ass. It was all open and yucky fabric. I didn't even try going up another size out of fear. All of these crappy swatch problems makes me sad. I was looking forward to knitting this sweater! I decided that I already had the yarn, may as well knit it. If I knew French how to write French I'd insert the pharse "such is life" here. Sadly, I don't. It's probably for the best though... I can return it and get some yummy soft Rowan Calmer or something of such wonderfulness.

I'm starting to fully embrance the fact that when I knit myself a nice sweater made of 100% wooly goodness, I mostlikely will not wear said sweater. I'd spend my day itching and scratching, looking like I had ants in my sweater, instead of my pants. I looked into my closet, thought good and hard, realizing that the sweaters I know and love are cotton, or a soft merino wool. Or, glup, arylic. I'm going to just be okay with this though, and knit wooly things for others. There is STILL lots of yummy yarns for me to knit. They just have a smaller gauge. Which is fine and dandy. It's just sometimes nice to knit a nice chunky sweater.

Yesterday I bought the new Rowan Mag, number 37. Methinks I'll get to knit lots of the nice cotton sweaters outta this mag. I also bought yarn for Elspeth. Four balls of beautiful Cream Calmer are waiting to be knit up. Pippa is cute, and might just have to be a must knit. I love Charely, the sweater the man is wearing on the left. It's wonderful. Oh, I also bought some yarn to make this Buckle Bag. First things first, I must finish up Fanny. She and I got her into a pickle. Here at Shaken, Not Stirred we are shaken up. We're not sure how to fix this lil problem. That will just have to be a whole post on it's own. Oy vey.

*Goodness, the control ("Ctrl") key of my keyboard just fell off the keyboard! I was holding it in my hands! What an odd feeling. Luckily I'm at work, breaking work's keyboard, not my own.