My knitting spot this afternoon, the driveway. Necessary tools: the beach chair, graph paper, gauge ruler, my latest swatch, iphone (for the calculator), Latvian Mittens (for a pattern), Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting (for more patterns), and Simply Shetland 4 (for the Autumn Rose schematic).

On the left is a new swatch on 3.25 mm needles this time as I wasn't even close to gauge on 2.75 mm. I'm still not on gauge for Autumn Rose but I prefer my colorwork knitting to be a little tighter for better stitch definition so I don't want the fabric to be any looser. My gauge is 32 stitches and 32 rows to 4 inches, the Autumn Rose gauge is 30 stitches and 32 rows to 4 inches, so I will go up a size. I tried an ombre look, but I don't think it works, the brownish orange and the medium orange just don't like each other.

One of these days I would like to do a color dense Fair Isle style sweater where there are a billion colors in the foreground and background patterns, but I'm finding it very hard to pick colors online and Knit Picks doesn't offer a color card for Palette. So instead of adding more colors, I find myself simplifying and eliminating colors because some of the ones that I ordered aren't playing together nicely. Local yarn shops don't seem to carry much fingering weight Shetland type wool either, and if they do there is just a smattering of what they think are the prettiest colors and not much of balance between lights and darks. There's someone coordinating a Palette yarn sampler (10 yards of each color) on the Knit Picks Lovers group on Ravelry and I've gone in on a share. Next time that will function as my color card.

On the right is Pinneguri's Latvian Garden with the hearts with replaced with little people, now it's a Garden Party!