Tuesday 29 January 2013

Nearly missed January!

Where did that time go? I'm not long back from a folk-dance weekend and the Australian Open is over, so it must be nearly the end of the month!

So in order to show you something, I'm putting up a couple of pictures of things I've been knitting recently.



This was the cardigan I made for myself from some yarn I got at a Stitch and Craft exhibition. I'd bought two colourways of what I now know was the just discontinued Noro Silk Garden Chunky. The first made up into a sleeveless jacket/body warmer - not quite a gilet, as it had cap sleeves. I don't appear to have any photos of that, so I can't show it to you today. But I wanted something more of a jacket for the second lot of yarn, so I scoured the country on the net, and managed to get enough for a full cardigan. And then of course, being me, got about halfway up the body and decided it wasn't right, so unpicked it all. Last April's Simply Knitting came to the rescue with a cable patterned cardigan in chunky - and you see the results here. The cabling helps keep the whole thing from being too unstructured, which the pattern I started first of all was in danger of being, as it was in plain stocking-stitch. They also interlock  so that the widest part of each cable is next to the crossover part of the next-door one, which I thought was a great effect.

Naturally I changed things; theirs was a demure grey, as opposed to my vibrant colour mix - I had to use two different dye lot numbers  but with a variegated yarn, dye batches are not that important anyway. And the original had a wrap-over with a belt, which I knew would make me look like a sack of potatoes, so I made buttonholes and sewed on some buttons instead.




And then I decided to make a first birthday present for the little girl who had Lewis the elephant so I started with some supposedly baby yarn - but after a while it seemed to feel almost slimy, and I just couldn't work with it any more. So I started another jumper with some soya cotton ... only to find it was making up into something that would be enormous on a five-year-old! So I found yet another pattern, this time for aran yarn, and made this little cardigan - and had enough over to make a hat to go with it. 

So there you are ... just made it before the new month is upon us!