Diamond Mesh

Finally! Knitter's Magazine hasn't exactly been batting a thousand for me lately, but there's a project in the current issue that looks good to me.

What yarn? What yarn?

I decided to go stash shopping in the basement. This requires mustering both bravery and imagination on my part, because the choice seems so... final. I'm not such a good knitter that the result is generally better than the possibilities. I'm a brave person, but I'm not very imaginative. I want to have the final project come out perfectly, and I fret that my choice of yarn - especially when the fiber and gauge are way different than the designer's choice -will not come out well. Still, I know I must have stuff that would work.

Well, several years ago, my friend Vicki and I went in together on a yarn deal. We got a large number of cones of yarn for just the cost of shipping. I selected two cones from our lot One was a charcoal boucle, and the other was a pink silk/cotton (whatever did Vicki do with the rest of those cones? :-) ).

After combing through my stash, the cone of pink silk/cotton called to me. Other yarn would have been suitable and would have given me gauge without messing around. But I kept going back to the pink cone. The yarn was too thin, so I loosely plied it together with my spinning wheel. The result was still a bit skinny, so after a gauge swatch, I re-gauged the pattern. It knit up fairly quickly. I finished the seams last night.

I feel especially good because it cost me about fifty cents (broken down from the shipping cost of all the cones - yarn was free)!