Somehow amidst the DIY and the moving and the not having a blog up and running, I managed to get quite a bit of knitting done.
First, I finished knitting my Tubey and discovered a major problem with adapting pattern for a ribbed top that requires you to pick up stitches to start your ribbing. If you don’t pick up stitches and instead knit it in two separate sections, how do you know how far to stretch the ribbing before you sew the two sections together? This isn’t an entirely rhetorical question, if anyone has any sensible suggestions, please let me know. At the moment, the two sections are held together with safety pins to allow me to try them on. Trying it on, it looks great but it’s currently sitting on a shelf waiting for me to work out how to sew it together. The current plan involves Steven basting me into it so that I can them seam it and adjust as necessary so if anyone has any better ideas, I really would love to hear them. Plan B is blocking it to approximately the right size and then seaming and adjusting but I’m worried about stretching the ribbing too far this way.
I really love this jumper on and will probably make another one at some point. Not quite yet though as the endless ribbing in the round is pretty boring.
Next was Celestine, which is going to be a christening present for our neighbours’ baby boy. It’s a dodecahedron (twelve-pointed star) knitted entirely in the round. Each point is knitted by picking up stitches along the edge of the previous point so there’s no seaming. Yup, that’s right, no seaming whatsoever. I couldn’t face the thought of knitting this on DPNs so decided I would attempt to learn Magic Loop. This was, at least in part, also because my DPNs are still packed in a box somewhere, yet miraculously I had a long, flexible 2.5mm circular needle unpacked.
This turned out to be an excellent project to learn Magic Loop on. Plenty of practice at casting on and off and short enough rows that I hadn’t forgotten how to rearrange the stitches by the time that I got halfway through.
I definitely prefer using Magic Loop to using 4 or 5 small needles so I’ve decided to attempt another pair of socks using it. Partly because I bought some pretty sock yarn to celebrate the grand opening of the new I Knit store and partly because the sock knitters nearly have me convinced that I’m missing out on something because I don’t knit socks. The yarn is Cherry Tree Hill supersock merino in the Moody Blues colourway. (You might spot a bit of a blue theme to this post!).
Continuing the blue theme, I had some yarn left over from Celestine and since it was Easter weekend and Steven had bought me a fabulous TARDIS Easter egg, I decided to continue my adventures in Magic Loop and knitted him an Easter egg.
I’m not sure he knew exactly what to make of it but it did at least raise a chuckle (although that might have been at my expense). The arcane scribblings in the photo are my attempts at studying for my upcoming exams and, no, I don’t know what they’re supposed to mean either.
Finally, I got back to working on my Double Vision blanket. I’ve now knitted 16 squares out of 100 and am desperate to get to the end of this section (19 squares) so that I can start working with the next colour. Since the entire project is simple garter stitch, the fascination comes from seeing how the two strands of different colours combine. I’ve seen all the combinations for the first colour now and want to start seeing the rest. I really must try and get some decent pictures of this blanket taken.
