Autumn has arrived along with the requisite switching of the closets. Generally this is a good thing as summer dressing is my least favorite and I I find joy in my reacquaintance with jeans, sweaters, boots, wool, and velvet. I actually love this weather with mornings int he 40s and daytimes in the 60s or 70s. But I don't mind looking forward to colder days with warm sweaters and toasty fires.
But what, you may ask, about all those knitted tees I have made this past year? Actually, they are perfect for the kind of weather we are having right now. It is not yet woolly sweater season. But the temperatures are perfect for layering and for thicker tees, which brings me 'round to yet another addition to my growing hand-knitted tee collection.
Presenting Arizona Sandstone.
This was a deep stash project. The yarn, from a long since closed store called ArtFibers in SanFrancisco, was purchased before my grandson was born. Named Fauvé, the yarn is a knitted tape, with alternating sections of beige cotton and a purple/lavender/bronze nylon blend. The yarn is complicated enough that it seemed best suited to a simple tee, so to start I simply began playing with stitches. Half-linen stitch is an old favorite for hand-dyed and novelty yarns, and I really liked the way the yarn knitted up in half-linen stitch, forming striations that reminded me of the patterns and colors of sandstone in the Arizona desert.
I didn't remember what my original plan was for the yarn so once I got a gauge I liked, it was simple enough to make the calculations for a simple tee. I wasn't initially sure if I would include sleeves, simply because I didn't know how much yarn I would need. So I started with the idea of a sleeveless shell, and figured I would ad lib from there.
Well, I did have enough yarn, but I dilly-dallied a bit before actually starting on the sleeves. I finished the body of the sweater on September 11th, but didn't pick up the yarn again to knit the sleeves until October 1. The sleeves only took a day to knit, but did that mean that I was on a roll and finished the sweater forthwith? No, it did not.
Cooler weather and the advent of autumnal colors started to seep into my head, eventually reminding me to get this project seamed and finished. And now I have a new light-weight tee. I think it will see a great deal of wear.
Technically the colors are a little on the warm side for me. But they are also muted, and I can lean more toward muted warmth than I can toward clearer warm colors, so this tee actually works well with a great deal of my wardrobe.
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