Did you think I’d forgotten how to knit? Sorry dearies. The truth is, I have had precious little knitting time this month. No more classes to sit in + No books assigned to read + A lot of writing to do = not more than a few stitches here and there. Cooking is a little more insta-gratifying. Baking with sprouted grain takes a few days of waiting, but hey, that’s a lot less waiting than finding 60 hours to knit a sweater. All the same, a little knitting is more than no knitting, and I have a couple things to show for May’s time.
Today, I give you the Rivendell Smoke Ring: the next entry in my quest to knit through The Lord of the Rings. It was knit while Jared continued with the “Council of Elrond” (It’s a really long chapter), ending with the eponymous Fellowship finally forming.
I knit this cowl once before, with my own hand-dyed gradient. I loved the pattern, even though my dyejob was a little unsatisfactory, and have worn the finished piece a lot.
I love this stitch pattern. The twisted ribbing is definedly architectural, and each ribbed section flows perfectly into the openwork section above it. Susan captured perfectly the sense of being in the trees, while at the same time being in an ordered structure.
The yarn was a gradient set from The Unique Sheep, in the nearly-perfectly-named colorway “Mirkwood.” Nothing makes a pattern go quicker than figuring out when to swap the next skein in and out to grade into a the next color shift.
The cowl is just large enough to squeeze over my head, making it a good under-coat cowl. But it is small enough to make an elf-cap for my little ham. She kept it on for an hour, little goose. Ever since she learned how to say “hat” she has gotten rather excited about putting things on her head. And even though her use of the word “hot” sounds exactly the same to me, she seems to know the difference between the two concept. My little brainy.
This was the last small project in the Fellowship series. I don’t anticipate finishing the next one until October at least, as a few other priorities have to jump the queue during the even-more-limited knitting time in my summer. So our Fellowship, finally formed, gets to linger a little longer in Rivendell, until the leaves start falling. That is the appropriate season for their setting out on a southward hike to match their timing in the book. You will hear no complaints in this homely house.
Osborn Fiber Studio 
One thought on “Rivendell”