Devoted

I have been knitting with a vengeance this week.  I've hit that critical mass point on Pulelehua where you're so close to the end that it becomes a little bit of an obsession.  I ripped through as many rows as I could every night this week, and now I'm on the very last one - the one that increases the stitch count from 600 stitches to 1200.  Oh my.



This last row takes time because every third stitch of the previous row is a YO, and you are creating 6 stitches out of each YO on the final row.



I've seen enough FO pictures to know it will be worth it, but - it's a lot of stitches.

If I can get Pule (as all of us on Romi's group affectionately call this one) done by tomorrow evening, I'll have the whole Memorial Day weekend to work on a new project.  I had planned to cast on Calliope, which is the only published Muse I haven't completed yet, but the most recent Pins and Lace Project, Meadowgold, is calling my name a little bit.  We shall see which one wins out!  I'm trying to get through all the Romi shawls I haven't knit yet before she releases any more.  She's tough to keep up with and if I get too far behind I will never get everything knit!

It's been a bit all Romi, all the time over here since I discovered her designs.  How do I love Romi? Let me count the ways.

First and foremost, her patterns are thoughtful.  I love to knit things that are meaningful in some way or another, and Romi's designs always have an inspiration behind them that I can really get on board with.

Second, her patterns are clever.  She always has some neat little technique or different way of doing something that just makes me sit back and admire.

Third, her patterns are clear.   The charts are big enough, they're easy to understand, and I don't have to remember to do a different stitch on the wrong side of the work.  I think this may actually have frustrated some people who are accustomed to doing this, but I find it so much less headache-inducing.  I understand why other patterns work the way they do and it is much easier to see what your knitting is supposed to look like, but when it comes to the actual step by step of doing things - Romi's way is so much simpler.

The fourth reason I love Romi is that she is just a nice person, and the group of people who congregate on the forums of Romi's group is really stellar.  I just enjoy knitting with all of them so much (also, I am pretty sure they constitute the vast majority of my blog readership, which I am deeply grateful for).  We have a (completely reasonable for a designer's group) rule that we don't talk about nonRomi projects except in passing, and so when I start a nonRomi project, it feels a little bit lonely.  I've tried to get involved in other groups but I just don't really feel at home the way I do on Romi's forum. 

So, those are my reasons for my Romi obsession.  There are some designers whose designs I love but whose patterns I can't stand.  There are designers I love who just don't publish patterns often enough.  There are designs that catch my eye on Ravelry.  But 99% of the time, all the other projects take a back seat, because knitting along with my fellow Rominettes is just so much fun.

And now that I've said all that - I'm working on a nonRomi project.



It doesn't look like it now but this is a bunny.  My prayer shawl group always does a summer project that is not shawls, and this time the plan is to knit monsters to be donated to TAPS.  A bunny is not a monster but I didn't really get into any of the monster patterns.  So, I am knitting a bunny instead.  Maybe I will embroider some fangs.  The pattern is Henry's Rabbit and I'm knitting it in KnitPicks Swish Superwash in a colorway I can't remember - Doe, I think.  It's a nice computer project, where I can do a few rows while I wait for something to load or whatever. 

I'm also knitting a sock for CodeNinja that I forgot to photograph.  But mostly, it's all Pule all the time around here!