My stash diving and holiday knitting continue.  Unfortunately, my camera and camera skills are far from the best (plus I’m still having some platform issues left over from my system upgrade), so you’ll have to use some imagination on this one.

Believe it or not, there are three strange and blurry objects above.  At the top is a long scarf knit in the loopy mohair previously described.  It’s in plain old garter stitch, but the resulting fabric looks a lot like the curly lamb stoles my great aunts wore four decades ago.  It’s plush and lush.  It also left precious little left over, but I contrived a simple beanie cap from the leftovers.  That’s the shapeless black lump at the bottom of the photo.

In between is a simple knit/purl patterned scarf in screaming yellow.  In this case, yellow is appropriate because the thing is a gift for a crossing guard.  The pattern is a basketweave variant from B. Walker’s Fourth Treasury.  The yarn is a well-aged stash resident – Brunswick Bermuda II.  Bermuda is a cotton/acrylic blend, with a maker’s gauge of 5 stitches per inch on US #6 needles.  I am not quite sure where I came by the five skeins of screaming taxicab yellow, but I suspect that this is a leftover from a project my mother made years ago.  I can say that I am not fond of working with the stuff.  It combines many of the worst features of both cottons and acrylics.

To start, Bermuda has a loosely twisted multi-strand construction, with about eight constuent plies.  Eight point-trapping nuisances that make this yarn a nominee for "Worst Splitting Yarn I’ve Ever Used."  The stuff is unstretchy as one would expect, but so much so that knitting evenly with it is a huge challenge.  To keep my stitches uniform, I’m having to knit as tightly as possible, especially on the transitions between knits and purls.  Even so, a knit/purl combo pattern is better than all stockinette for this yarn, as the texture doesn’t betray those "I’m knititng with an uncooperative cotton" occasional leggy bits.  But I can go on…  The texture of this stuff is string-like and hard in the fingers, very uncomfortable to use especially given the tightness I’m trying to achieve.   I’ve knit up three skeins of Bermuda so far.  One more should make the scarf a useable length, and any leftovers will become fringes.  Ending this one off can’t come soon enough for me.

I’m not quite sure what stash diving I’ll do next, or what the next bit of knitting will be, but I suspect that there will be at least one more pair of socks between now and the holiday, plus some more snowflakes for the tree.