Anya

Anya is definitely not a take-along project! I think it is the most complicated knitting project I have tried so far. Almost every row is different what with cabling in the ribbing, stranded colorwork, and beading. You have to plan ahead to know what colors you are going to need and whether you need to string beads on the yarn. Sometimes a color is used for only one row and there are five colors to work with and three different kinds of beads!

But it is going to be beautiful! I've done about 20 more rows since I took this picture and am more than halfway up the front. The back will be exactly the same. I work at the dining room table where the light is good and I can have the work and all the necessary paraphernalia at my fingertips.

I made three or four copies of the chart, enlarging one of them to see the little squares better. I even had to get out a magnifying glass to see the tiny dots inside the squares as the colors range from black to dark gray to gray, silver, and cream, and there's not a huge difference between them on the chart.

I'm a little worried that there won't be enough of the silver since the Kidsilk Haze (and Kidsilk Night) is used double throughout and there seems to be a lot of rows that need it. That's the only color that I have only one ball of, so I pulled the strand from the middle as well as the outer edge in order to make it double. Working with the KSH double is a whole lot easier than using the single strands as I have done for lacework and I love the poufy clouds of fuzz it makes when you strand two colors together. This will be one warm sweater!

Working on the bouclé placemats turned out to be a good idea, too. The little hills and valleys keep the beads from rolling around when I am trying to string them. But I am certainly not looking forward to having to weave in all those loose ends when this is finished!