Knitting Round Up
I have been working on a bunch of little projects and finishing up one big one before I settle down to my annual Christmas Angel crochet frenzy.
There is a new nephew and a friend’s first baby due in January so baby knits have been high on the list. Neither shower has taken place yet though so I won’t spoil any surprises here, but if you are on Ravelry you can find my latest baby projects here, here, and here. There is still one baby piece to finish this week to complete a set.
Someplace in there I snuck in my third test knit. The square spiral hat by Samantha Leopold-Sullivan. This was the first double knitting project I ever attempted and this was an excellent pattern to do this with. After a few false starts as I learned to double knit, the hat knitted up quickly and easily. It is super warm, but a little big for our small heads. I used 100% wool so it too is sitting in the “needs final finishing” pile awaiting a quick wash and gentle felting.
The big thing keeping me busy lately was a new cardigan for me. I used Lion Brand Homespun in the olive colorway to knit the Lion Brand Cropped Cardigan. I planned to modify this by adding a bit of length so it sits at the hip instead of being cropped. This is finished – except for the buttons which are on order. I remembered to put the body together and measured for the sleeves before knitting them and wound up needing shorter sleeves than the pattern called for. Once the sweater was together, the neck wound up very wide and low, so I added a collar to this. As written the neck is left with just the bound off stair-step edge around the front of the neck. This was a very unprofessional finish to a pattern and left the sweater looking half finished.
I don’t know if it is just the yarn, but it seems like every time I knit with homespun I begin at gauge and wind up with a sweater that measures at much bigger than gauge when I am done. Once the body was put together I measured the gauge of the finished sweater and modified the stitch count for the sleeves to compensate so I would wind up with sleeves the actual dimensions of the sweater. A schematic in the pattern would have been nice. I had to do all the math myself to figure out the final dimensions.
Even with the broken rib pattern I find that the front edges are curling inward. I will probably be adding a reverse single crochet edge along the fronts to help stabilize them a bit.
With these modifications I was able to make the large size only breaking into the fifth skein for a few rows of my add-on collar. This is significantly less yarn than the 7 skeins called for. I understand that Lion Brand wrote the pattern to allow waste for matching a variegated yarn on the body pieces, but it would be nice if they also included information for yarn usage in solid colors too. I personally would be upset with almost 3 leftover skeins of yarn if I hadn’t known better and purchased the 7 called for.
Coming soon: The Goddess Knits Anniversary Shawl, Secret of the Stole III – Estes Park finished, and my first attempt at spinning for a sweater. You’ll have to wait for the the baby showers for the baby knit gallery.




