Persistent Knitter

Ok, so the title is really cheesy - but I just couldn’t resist. I must be getting a bit loopy waiting for the baby to deliver :)

Today I had to sit through a 2 hour meeting at work. Luckily it was a large meeting with no participation necessary by me except staying awake and paying attention. I took my knitting and discreetly made great progress on Hardangervidda.

I put it on two needles tonite and measured it - it’s coming out at 48" around at the hem part. This is perfect! I’m aiming for a 50" chest, and that should give me enough room to loosen up as I get into the stockinette portion of the body. After I finish the block ribbing, I’ll be doing the second pattern of colorwork. The pattern says to switch to 3.5mm needles, but I’m thinking of doing it on 3.0mm needles and seeing if I get any draw in which would make it necessary to switch to the larger needle for the patternwork. I would switch back to the 3.0mm needle for the stockinette part of the body anyway. Hmm… decisions decisions :)

I finished swatching for Ingeborg. I am practicing my steeking techniques and thought I’d try a crochet steek first. Here’s what the results look like:

I don’t think it worked quite right because I have floats in the steek zone and after I cut through them, they aren’t anchored by anything. I think I was supposed to do either a striped or speckled steek so that there wouldn’t be any floats in the steek area. Good lesson to learn on a swatch, that’s for sure. I also realized because my swatch is so narrow I am not sure if I’ll be able to get it over my sewing machine arm to machine stitch it down. I wasn’t feeling gutsy enough to hand sew it tonite - maybe tomorrow.

Here’s the run down of the colors I tried:

You see at the very far left that I did Natural & Snow. I drew a line so you could see where the cutoff from one to the other is. I can hardly tell the difference between the two depending on the lighting so I decided I didn’t like either. Although I do like how it looks, it’s too much contrast for what I wanted this sweater to look like. I checked with the intended recipient (Hi mom!) and she said the colors I picked looked fine, and we think we won’t do the pointy lacy things on it after it’s finished with button band. Speaking of button band - I’ll be using the Claret for the border & bands on it. So it’ll only be a two color sweater - but still fabulous!

I haven’t measured gauge yet. Whatever the swatch came out as, that’s what I’ll use as the main gauge and adjust the sizing of the pattern from there. No more re-doing the sleeve a zillion times for me!

Comments on Comments…
Ingrid and Judy both suggested using a DPN for the provisional cast on stitches, and only doing about 20 at a time to make life easier. This is a great idea, except for the fact that I totally messed up my crochet chain and it undid from the wrong end (gee, did I forget to mention this small fact?). So I had to put all the stitches on a needle in order to get back around to where I could get to the starting point. It was a good learning experience, and I’ll try harder next time to get my crochet chain going the right direction!