Pooling diamonds and fall leaves

It's fall, the season of pumpkins, pumpkin pie, turkey dinner (we've already had our Thanksgiving dinner here in Canada) and, of course, lots of knitting!

Andrew and I went to the pumpkin patch with his Grade 1 class. This photo was taken when the rain had taken a brief intermission down to a light mist. About 10 minutes after this, the skies opened, and the wind came on, and we had sideways rain and rain so hard that it actually bounced off the puddles and mud and you had to call it upside down rain. (Yes, we probably have about 50 different terms for wet precipitation in this town.)

And then last night, there was more rain and wind, and when we came out this morning, our cherry tree had dumped half its leaves into the yard. So the boys and I raked up a lot of it, and they had a little bit of a leaping competition. (Andrew won.)

And I've been knitting on another pooling project, so I'm pleased to offer up another pattern. This one's going to Angela in San Francisco. I first met her on Ravelry when I ran out of yarn for my Icarus shawl, and she offered to wind off some for me and send it to me.

She sent me this skein of yarn as a surprise treat for me, so I turned it into a stole and I'm sending it back to her -- and you get a free pattern out of it!

Pooling Diamonds Stole

Here it is on Ravelry!



(Note: If you're new to the pooling technique, please read the first pattern in this series to get a good idea of how to figure out where your yarn will pool.)

Using an "e" or backwards loop cast-on, cast on 83 stitches onto a US7 needle. Please see my previous posts about figuring out your own "magic number" for your tension on the needles you've chosen. For this pattern, it's pretty easy to subtract pairs of edge stitches if you need to use fewer stitches to get the pooling to happen.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Start working with the chart below. The stitches in yellow are your garter edging. My edging had 3 stitches in it, but your edging will be different depending on your stitch tension, so please add or subtract stitches as you need to.

(Click on the chart to get it in a larger, more printable size.)

End with a Row 9 or a Row 19.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Bind off very loosely using a sewn bindoff, to maintain the pooling.

Block and pin out the stole. I added light scallops for interest, though you can also pin it out flat.

(For this project, I used Wollmeise 80/20 Twin yarn in Versuchskaninchen 1. It has a little less yardage than its 100% cousin, so this stole blocked out to almost 5' long, as compared to the almost 6' length that I get from the 100% superwash yarn. But it was worth it to discover that this yarn has a lovely, silky feel to it.)


And here's a sneak peek at my next pooling stole colourway -- Wollmeise 100% in Okzident.