Persistent Knitter

My friend Rebecca has designed a gorgeous Lace Sock for theknitter.com’s SOTM club (February 2005 to be exact). I’m the lucky one that gets to test knit it!

The yarn is Zimba Top in fingering weight.  I haven’t used this yarn before (that I can remember) but reports from the designer are that some of the colors can be a bit scratchy & rough feeling.  The white used in the sock here though feels pretty soft even in skein form.  The test sock she knit felt nice and soft too, so I don’t have any fears about the final product.

A good friend of mine is having his first baby this May. Typically I make a quilt, but this time around I thought I would try my hand at knitting a baby blanket.   My Mother-in-law made a great baby blanket for Alex, and I’m going to steal the idea/pattern from that one.  What yarn am I using?

This gorgeous soft stuff:

It’s GGH Merino Soft, fingering weight.  Supposedly machine washable. I sense a swatch of this in my future to try to wash/dry with a machine to see how well it will hold up.  I ordered two different colors from my friend Judy;  and the other one is on backorder (phooey), although she got two big boxes of stuff yesterday that she hasn’t opened up yet that might have the other color in it.  This is the darker of the two (I think, I honestly can’t remember).  The other is a lighter shade of teal.  I think I will do the main part of ht blanket in one color, and then some sort of trim in the other color.  Since this color showed up first - It wins as the center, unless the other stuff shows up before I really get started :)

The color on this picture is actually fairly accurate (notice TNS hiding behind the yarn? Argh. Dark purple is just impossible to photograph!)

I finished the back of The Nanny Sweater last weekend if you can believe it.

The colors really aren’t very true, but it was as good as I could get it with such little time.
25" tall, and just the right width (have no idea what that is right now, and it will block slightly wider)

Calculations Ahoy

After finishing the back, I spent the next evening’s knitting time with paper and pen and calculating what to do for the two fronts.  You’d think I could just blindly follow the pattern, but since I’m making a size smaller than any that are in the pattern itself, we have to do a little math.

It’s easy for the back - you just cast on 2 less repeats and there ya go.  The shoulder shaping stumped me until I realized what the shaping was for. It’s basically to let the sweater hang down a little bit where the drop sleeves are.  Based on the new sizing, I now know how many stitches are going to be considered shoulder stitches.

So how about the two fronts of the cardigan? I have figured out how many stitches to cast on, and will have to do a bit more thinking about the neck line decreases when I get there. I need to make sure I end up with the same number of shoulder stitches as the back.  An hour or so with pen and paper should hopefully eliminate any ripping time.

Next on the Agenda

I’ve also finished the pocket linings. No pictures yet, sorry.  Have started both fronts.  My friend Dianne suggested I knit both fronts at the same time so that they come out the same size.  That’s what I’m doing. The tangling of the yarns is driving me a bit batty; the yarn doesn’t slip-n-slide as I would want it to.

So on the pocket linings - being the non-joiner that I am, I couldn’t just knit the pocket linings as directed. I had to change it up a bit. Directions say to knit in stockinette until 6" long. I though that’d be an unholy mess of rolling fabric to try and sew down.  I’m doing a moss stitch border around the whole thing (only three stitches wide) so they are laying fairly flat.