Twister teaser

The talented TutleyMutley dropped by and asked where we had moved from - it was from Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, on 19th Feb 2007. Nearly time to celebrate the first anniversary of starting our new life!

In the meantime, here's a welcome bright patch in our rather grim wintry back garden at the moment - our lovely camellia, coming into full bloom.

The garden resembles more of a building site - and will do for a good while this year - as we're not landscaping it until our extension is completed. And that's not even started yet. ;-)

I had to show you the beautiful sunrises we get here - this one from this morning.

The lefthand picture is from upstairs (we're in a dormer bungalow) - great view across the rooftops of the surrounding bungalows and out over the countryside.

The righthand picture is from our bedroom, which is downstairs, so we get to see the palm trees in the front garden. I never thought I'd live somewhere with palm trees in the garden! :-)

Oh yes, and the knitting i.e the Twister sweater. The knitting is all done! I've seamed the shoulders and sewn in the sleeves; just the side and sleeve seams to do. Hopefully in a couple of evenings I'll have a FO to show you. I even have enough yarn left to sew the seams, and a little more - maybe for a hairband or similar.

I'm starting to compile a list of lessons learned, which I'll share with the FO. Watch this space!

7 tinks on a Friday night

I don't know why, but I've always liked the number 7. I don't have the number anywhere in my date of birth and I've never lived at house number 7. Maybe it's just a comfortable familiar number, there being 7 days in the week. Maybe it's to do with the number supposedly being the amount of things we can remember readily. I don't know.

So what's this got to do with knitting? Well as I was working on the front neck and armhole decreases on the Twister tonight (whilst watching Jonathan Ross on TV - great show!) I realised that each side seemed to be pretty close to the number of stitches I needed for the shoulders. Which was a bit odd as I still had another 20-odd decrease rows left to do.

That's when I checked my decrease notes. (I had noted down each row number with a mark for the neck/armhole decrease where required right up to the shoulder shaping - its' the only way I can keep track when the decreases are at different rates). Of course I should have checked them when I first wrote them down, but hindsight is a wonderful thing, right?

It came as no surprise to find that I'd carried on the armhole decreases way further than I should have done in my notes, and I needed to undo 7 (there's that number again!) rows of work on both sides of the front. Thankfully they were only rows of 30-odd stitches each side.

Of course it was irksome to undo what I had spent time creating, and to be regressing rather than going forwards. But as I worked the slow, deliberate tinking movements, I realised that it was actually quite satisfying. I wasn't going to fudge around the problem and always know it was there, even if others didn't notice. I was carefully peeling it back to the point where I could make the error disappear. Magically erased. Vanished.

Now the offending 7 rows of decreases have gone. The shaping is as it should be. The problem never existed. :-)

Oh and Della - my confidence is slowly growing that I will have enough yarn left for the remaining sleeve. But I've still got my fingers crossed.

Go baby!

The Twister is rockin' on - front nearly done - woohoo!

Can you have a slow twister?

Oh yes you can. The Twister sweater is progressing very slowly right now.

I've not had much time to knit over the last week or so, apart from doing a single 6-row pattern repeat a few evenings back.

That was not a good evening - just before I put the knitting down I realised that I'd made a big mistake. Can you spot it?

Well there are supposed to be 5 rows inbetween each cable row - but not in this photo!

Having worked a further 5 rows of 138 stitches since the offending mis-placed cable row, there was no other option. Tonight I ripped the front and started it over again... Grrr!

Anyway, I received a weird shape parcel this week. It was something I'd bid for on ebay and then completely forgotten about. (It's been a very intense week at work!)


Look - it's my very own niddy-noddy at last, and with a mound of free fleece too!

I guess I'd better get that drop spindle out sometime soon and actually try some spinning.

Right now is probably a really good time as the weather is awful - high winds and almost constant rain - and it's forecast to carry on for a good few days yet. Bleugh!

Excuse me, did you say progress..?

The crazy cable sleeve is finished, and it has 13,006 stitches (including cast-on and cast-off). It looks amazing and feels wonderful.

And I'm going to frog it.

I used 86 grams of the merino for the sleeve so I do have enough for the whole sweater, but I've changed my mind about a few minor details. Only little things... like the gauge... the design... the size... :-)

I clipped the sleeve together and tried it on - a very illuminating thing to do.

Whilst it fitted, it was too snug for what I had envisaged. I like a good fit, but I don't want it to feel like a second skin. I had stretched the swatch slightly to measure the gauge, but obviously I couldn't tell what that would feel like in the finished garment - until now.

And that twisted rib; it looked great but when stretched taught it reminded me too much of the plastic-feel-acrylic throttlingly tight poloneck handknit sweaters I was encased in when I was a child. It had to go.

So I've changed both the pattern gauge and the design. I've taken away the twisted ribbing and replaced it with a minimal garter stitch edging. I've replaced the funnel neck with a v-neck. I've added more ease to the whole garment.

I've also swatched another stitch pattern. Whilst those all-over cables were gorgeous, the final look was rather too intense over a large piece of knitting.

DH questioned my sanity when I modelled the sleeve and announced that it was headed for the frog pond. He asked how long it had taken me to knit it (I don't get much knitting time atm) - and I suggested that it would be silly continuing to knit a garment that I knew wasn't what I wanted...

So here's version 2. There are some plain columns between the cables, no rib, and the fit is looser.

It's quite different to what I had initially imagined, and it may still change again. But that's the joy of designing your own garment isn't it?!

Cable heaven

That's where I seem to have gone. I adore this yarn and cable pattern so much, I have to make myself put it down. Of course whether that's still the case if I don't have enough yarn and need to start over remains to be seen.

Quite why I've become obsessed with cables is a mystery to me. I love the look of them (unlike bobbles) but rarely feel the need to knit them. It must be something to do with the cold weather I guess!

The plan is to finish this sleeve (not long to go!), then calculate exactly how much yarn is required for the whole garment based on how much I used for the sleeve.

Fingers crossed..

When all is not as it seems

Sometimes things seem that they will be perfect... and then they turn out to be not quite so good. As was that perfect pattern for the merino chocolate orange yarn.

As I worked the first sleeve, increasing slowly, I realised that all was not well. The stitch pattern covered 24 rows, but seemed to jump after the first half. Although the knitting looked pretty good, I couldn't get the flow - and had no idea how to bring those new side stitches into the pattern.

I measured the progress I had so far, and realised that if I followed the increase instructions, the finished sleeve would measure 24" from cuff to armhole - even my arms aren't that long!

The pattern gauge was given in stocking stitch, and I had matched it exactly, but the lace cable pattern for the actual design was turning out to be a different beast.

Things had to change. I frogged the 3" of sleeve I had worked, and decided to create my own pattern.

I thought about what I liked from this design, browsed through my stitch dictionaries for a while, and ended up with this:

I'm doing basically the same shape garment, but with a flowing cable design - twisted 2-stitch cables rotating anti-clockwise for the cuffs and collar, leading into wider 6-stitch cables turning clockwise in alternate columns as they climb the garment.

It flows - and I like it.

Serendipity - the Tale of a New Project

Yep, I've found another great new project.. I think I'm suffering from startitis at the moment. I had dug out the allotted yarn for the "Central Park Hoodie" but didn't like the swatch, so that's been shelved again for now in favour of this...

Almost 12 months ago, after spending the day manning a stall at a particularly uninspiring craft fair (i.e. virtually no sales), I agreed a great trade with Fiona of Yarnwise - 4 of my knitted collars for 500g of gorgeous chocolate orange merino wool.
Think clementines, conkers, and steaming hot chocolate all swirled up together in the dyebath...

The merino has sat patiently waiting in the stash since then, until last month when I heard it sweetly singing to me. I wound it into balls, and put it in my "Pending"* stash box whilst keeping an eye open for pattern inspiration.

Now that the weather is finally cooling down, I decided on a sweater - but not just any old sweater. I want to end up with one of those favourite comfy kinds of sweater that is a joy to throw on and wear; not too heavy, not too cool, just the right size. One I want to wear all the time - you know the sort. It also has to be a joy to knit - not so complex that I need silence to work on it, but not an endless sea of stocking stitch either.

Two nights ago night serendipity struck! Whilst chatting to my in-laws (who had stayed for dinner as thanks for babysitting our DDs whilst we attended the school parent's evening) I decided to browse through my file of patterns (mainly prints of free web patterns that I've come across on random surf sessions) and, quite by accident, found the perfect match for the merino!

The pattern is for a lacy cabled sweater, from the Canadian yarn manufacturer Kertzer - and I'm so glad I printed it as it doesn't seem to be on their site now. It uses about 475g-worth of the yardage that I have in the merino, with exactly the same gauge - even the finished measurements seem to be perfect for my height and arm length which is unusual.

I was so excited I swatched immediately (bang on target), then unravelled and set it aside and started it last night. I know I should be carrying on with the other WIPs but I needed to get a sleeve on the go to use up some of the initial New Project Enthusiasm. :-)


* My stash is held (mainly) in a tower of plastic boxes which fill one corner of our bedroom. The upper boxes are naturally easier to get into, so I tend to use the yarn from those first. The top one is for yarn that I'm hoping to use next - i.e. "Pending". The yarns I'm working with currently are held in the very useful storage stool that came with our cream leather suite, which of course stays close to my chair... ;-)