Next up...

...Debbie Bliss Maya. This is another yarn that I was totally, utterly unable to prevent myself from buying. A bit like the sock yarn, really. It didn't help that Get Knitted acquired lots of the stuff just after it was discontinued, and had it at really fantastic prices. Still do, some of it. I have an embarrassing quantity of the stuff. I think the current tallies run at something like: - 10 balls of dark green/mid green/camel variegated - 10 balls of purple/maroon/fuschia variegated - 5 balls hot pink almost solid - 5 purple almost solid - an unknown number (read: I can't remember and I'm too lazy to look) of 'peach' variegated. It seems that I have this ...problem... with handpainted and variegated yarns. I see it in the ball (or the skein... in fact, particularly in the skein...) and I just droool. Drooling is embarrassing, especially in public, and the only way to stem the flow is to buy the stuff. Obviously. But I don't particularly like the variegation once knitted up. Pooling and flashing drive me nuts, and I don't like horizontal stripes, as a rule. (There are exceptions. You will see...) Cables don't show up in variegated yarn. Short colour runs in the yarn, like the Maya has, are better, but still hint at that stripiness, really. The solution appears to be moss stitch. It breaks up the stripes, pushing the current colour visually up and down between the rows.

The same yarn, swatched in both stockinette and moss stitch

Of course, Debbie Bliss book seven has no adult sweaters in the Maya, in moss stitch. There is a sweater, 'Lily', knit in moss stitch but a different yarn. It's quite cute, though:

Lily, from Debbie Bliss #7

I particularly like the fact that there is waist shaping not at the edges of the back piece, but set in about a quarter of the way from each edge. Of course, the yarn is different, and the gauge is different. This means maths, but, more scarily, a definite uncertainty as to whether or not I have enough yarn. I actually started knitting on this a couple of weeks ago, and have completed the back and probably just over half a sleeve, and I still don't know if I'll have enough yarn. I suspect not, even if I do the trim in a different yarn. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed as I knit. I really don't want to have to rip out that much moss stitch.