The Road to Venezia

Okay, so that was a little harder than I thought. But two of you guessed one of the designs, and since Sula already owns both books (and has an unfair advantage anyway since she apparently shares half of my knitting brain), our winner is the lovely Ms. Macoco. (Check your email!)


So yes: I'm taking the Venezia Pullover and Road to Golden, smashing them together, shaking well, and hoping they'll make beautiful babies. Horribly mixed metaphors aside, I'm frankly not positive this is a well-conceived plan.


Roughly speaking, the construction is mostly Golden, the colorwork pattern is all Venezia. That much should go fine. But between the coarser gauge and the simpler color scheme (I've scaled back from 10 colors to 5), I'm starting to worry that I'll sabotage what should be a beautiful brocade pattern and look instead like I've plastered myself in wallpaper. But maybe not. It could be gorgeous and intricate and awesome, or even garish in a cute way -- I'm remaining optimistic for now. Should I totally hate it, I can always rip back the colorwork portion, order more brown, and make a yoked sweater instead.

(Con)testing your skillz.

It's getting to be that time of year when I've fully recovered my post xmas mojo and harness it to knit myself a sweater that will be done just in time for the temperatures to preclude wearing it until next fall. I am nothing if not predictable. (I KNOW I could knit a summer garment, but I just don't want to, okay?)

Last year it was the stripey hourglass. This year I'm hybridizing two recent* sweater patterns, and I want YOU to guess which two. (There's something in it for you, as you might've guessed.) This was going to be my blogthday contest, and then it was going to be my knittiversary contest, but various factors intervened, and now it's a Just Because contest. You get three hints:

1. The authors of the two respective patterns are colleagues. (And not just in the sense that they're both knitwear designers -- they're employed by the same company.)

2. The titles of both patterns are at least vaguely geographical in theme.

3. One of the patterns is written for a fingering weight yarn, and the other for a worsted. I'm splitting the difference and using a sport weight:

Why yes, I AM more concerned with st gauge than row gauge. What tipped you off?

I'm only showing you the stockinette swatch, because obviously the pattern swatch would give away at least one of the two answers. But if you know my tendencies at all, the fact that I knit a pattern swatch in the first place might tell you something.

I can't tell if this is going to be super easy or super hard. I mean, it obvious to me because I already know. I've been thinking about this for months now and can't see it with an outsider's eyes. So if either lots of folks or nobody guesses correctly, I'll draw randomly. Partial credit may work in your favor. :)

And what do you stand to win?

We are loneleeeee and unused.

I've realized that owning knitting books is a silly venture for me. I rarely want to knit more than one or two patterns from any given book, and my library is great for that sort of thing. These are both lovely books, very lightly used, and I feel bad letting them sit on my shelf.

Comment by midnight PST on Friday, 3/7/08 with your guesses and which book you'd prefer, and I'll reveal the winner early next week. Good luck!!

*ETA: 'recent' = published in the last two years.