Brioche, My Love

I’m going through a phase where I just want someone else to do all the driving for awhile. And by driving, I mean designing. I was only moved to knit three things in the last 10 years that someone else did all the math for, but I have to say that at the moment there’s an awful lot of really beautiful things being created by so many talented people. One could almost feel like they are missing out a little.

Brioche, for one thing, is not a vernacular I spontaneously think of new ideas for, so I am content to let someone else boss my needles around for that. I can teach you to knit it in about 5 minutes, but design? I leave it to the super-experts. To wit: I currently have on the needles a top-down sweater in brioche by Stephen West called Briyoke in two different yarns from Green Mountain Spinnery. It is an excellent and mindless knit I can haul around to pub-knits and waiting rooms. It is a long-term project for me though because I seem to only knit on it when I am actually in pubs and waiting rooms, and since every round takes two passes, it’s a slow burn. It’s been such a slow burn in fact that I stashed the yarn around here somewhere in one of my manic tidying-up sessions last fall. I was really good at the stashing because now I can’t find it. I may even have to resort to buying more yarn to finish it because I turned over the house last weekend (buh-bye to all that zen-like tidyiness) looking for what I KNOW I BOUGHT ALREADY but I did. not. find. it. Now I have a messy house and no yarn.

Damn it.

So I cast on for another pattern, this time from Kate Atherley, to fill my Brioche spot: her new pattern the Friday Morning Brioche Shawl. Unlike the sweater, it took me like three days to knit it out of two skeins of Freia Fibers Ombre Sport (which despite the name is really more like a light worsted). I got such a huge kick watching the yarn change color I got almost nothing else done, so maybe three days isn’t going to be everyone’s result. But it is super fun and therefore probably going to go pretty fast for most knitters.

Kuffel by Alexis Winslow. Mine will be Red.

Keeping to my passenger-only agenda at the moment and finding my needles free again after that breeze of a project, I bought a sweater pattern from the new Hudson + West collection, Kuffel by Alexis Winslow. I share Alexis’ love of the graphic, and the moment I saw this sweater I realized it was even better that anything I might have been able to come up with were I ever honest with myself about how much I love the tailgate pattern on the trucks of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.

No, really.

I think I’ve Kinneared them in traffic more than once although I can’t seem to find one in my files at the moment (and I can’t claim to have ever tidied up in there). Hold on, google will help:

thank you, google

See what I mean? That’s a super sexy graphic if you ask me. No? well, anyway.

I bought Forge in Red Feather and Fawn, and I’m a few rounds in. I might get used to this knitting other people’s patterns for awhile. Maybe a very long while . . .