Beads, Yarn and Friendship

My friend F. and I thought it would be fun to knit projects in parallel using the same technique. We’d both been itching to do bead knitting, so deciding on that was easy. We agreed to knit scarves. And there the similarities between us might end. As knitters, anyway.

F. immediately threaded 150 glistening orbs of orange onto her pumpkin-colored cashmina (cashmere + merino) and launched into no less than seven test swatches of her own cabled design. With Barbara Walker’s Treasury at her side, she selected favorite stitches and began perfecting distribution of beads and balance of decorative stitches against a purly background and seed stitch border.

My bead collection has been growing for decades but alas, I didn’t have enough of any of the right size bead to knit with this beautiful handpainted wool you can see above. So any progress I might have made was delayed by bead shopping. I found some beautiful ones in size 6 that matched the yarn perfectly.

But they match so perfectly that they blended into the knitting, which defeats the whole purpose! I am much more of a ‘shoot from the hip’ kind of crafter but even I could see that I needed to rip this first attempt out and start over. Knitting up multiple test swatches does not come naturally to me — I’ll never write a publishable pattern, which is a bit of a disappointment but that’s another story. So rip it I did and took the yarn with me on the next bead shopping expedition.  

Here are the new results:

The beads show up better in real life and fairly glisten on the knitted surface.
You can see everything much more clearly here.

As for the idea of knitting projects in parallel, it’s been great fun. I marvel at F.’s willingness to knit, rip, re-knit, rip, re-re-knit, etc. And I promise photos of both finished scarves before long.