Christmas Greenery

Brought to you in redery and whitery.

I completed three more Christmas Balls this week – all from the chapter called Christmas greenery. The first, Selbu, is based on a pattern found in Selbu mittens. A quick Google search found the image on the right at the blog Yin & Yarn. You can see almost the exact motif from the ball across the wrists of the mittens.

      

Arne and Carlos describe this motif as representing a four-leaf clover.

Fittingly, the next ball’s pattern is called Three Leaf Clover. This one was kind of hard to pull off, because of the long floats between red stitches. I found that putting the red bead in at the base of the three leaves caused the red yarn to pull at the one other stitch on the entire side. I had to work a needle under the pulled stitch to try and loosen it up but it still looks like the “stem” is broken. It’s not bad enough for me to want to redo it, but, still, kind of wonky. Although this pattern is worked in quarter panels, the pattern bleeds across panels in an interesting way.

And finally, the third pattern is called Poinsettia. A bit stylized, I think, and very quilty. If you’d asked me, I would have thought I’d used many more silver beads so far, but a quick glance at this (and the tubes of beads) shows me the opposite. In fact, it looks like I’m going to have to get some more red beads, in addition to some more red yarn.

I am having all kinds of problems tracking down the yarn I want for a big project I want to start. So far, yarn is coming from two places. And I’ll probably have to order from a third. The first place told me part of my order would arrive from the mill in a week or so, but when I checked three weeks later, was told it wouldn’t be available until April. So I canceled the unavailable colors in order to try somewhere else. There was no indication on store 2’s website that they were out of one of the colors I ordered, but I can tell by how much they charged my credit card that they’re only shipping one of the colors – no correspondence with me about that at all. This is so frustrating. Why do online retailers not keep their inventory up-to-date on their websites?

So I wait and search. In the meantime, I can always knit more balls!