luxury tweed tanktop done

The slipover I've been making for my flatmate's birthday is done. I am holding it ransome till she seams the skirt she made me for my birthday, but the details can go up now.

Pattern: Nice design, but badly written. It works - there are no actual mistakes, it’s simply hard to read. The instructions are clear enough, but badly structured. I'd like to know instructions in the order I'd need to apply them thank you. But a nice enough pattern. I modified it to do 1x1 rather than 2x2 ribbing. But that is just because I'm stupid and didn't read that bit of the pattern properly*.

Yarn: Luxury Tweed. Mmmmm. Nice yarn. Nice colours.

Needles: 3.75mm circular addis for the back. I swapped to straights for the intarsia. I hate working on long needles, I feel ungainly. They were an old pair of metal ones that used to belong to my mother, and ok (for straights). The only 3.25mm circular we had was bamboo. Bamboo is not the needle for this yarn, the friction was just stupid. Plus these are the sorts of bamboo circs that have the annoying little bobbles at the join between needle and wire.

I actually quite enjoyed knitting this. I learnt to knit backwards and had a play with continental knitting too. It was fun and I'm very pleased with the finished product which I think'll suit Kirsty lots.

* Actually its because it said work "in rib" and I forgot to check which rib they meant. Would it hurt to say which rib when you are asking the knitter to start the ribbing, really? I know I have a below average short term memory (part of delights of being dyslexic) but well, pah gah blah blah blah (occasional failing of vocabulary also pleasure of dyslexia).

blogged

My Blogger and Google accounts are talking to each other way too much. It's boring and complex and involves differences betwen Blogger 2 Beta and regular Blogger and Googlemail (uk) and Gmail (regular) and is probably down mainly to my firefox settings. The consequence is that every time I try to log into Blogger they log me into Google instead and offer me all sorts of new and wonderful ways to make a blogger blog which is more like livejournal/ typepad but no actual access to THE BLOGS I HAVE ALREADY.

Arrg! After much tearing out of hair I ended up re-logging in using a different browser. Which on third attempt finally let me get into my dashboard.

Anyway, Knitting.



I have the two main pieces of the slipover done. It has a front! And a back! But it's all seaming and ribbing from now on in... That and the weaving in of ends. Let us not forget the weaving in of ends.

No happy dance of the FO yet.

back to front

Doesn't it look lovely and fluffy? I normally don't like fluffy but this yarn has just enough wool (65% merino, 35% alpaca) to keep it all in line, so the alpaca just gives it this lovely lightweight warmth. I have a load of it in a lavender colour waiting to turned into a cabled jumper for me.

In response to my last post,Ysolda suggested I try knitting backwards. Of course! I'd been wanting to try that after I saw the article in the last knitty*, and it works a treat.

I started off twisting stitches, but it wasn't long before I got the hang of it. A bit slower than purling, but you save the time of turning (and so reversing the arrangement of all the bobbins). I was worried it would mess up my gage but it doesn't seem to have made much difference.

Kerrie's posted up a sneak peak of my design on the yarn foward site. It's the knit side, which luckily prompted me to check I'd made it clear the pattern is reverse st st. This is the problem with purl-side as right-side, it can give the impression of being inside out. I have a big grey cardigan my boyfriend is always telling me I've got on the wrong way round.

* I've sometimes heard knitters say "knitty articles, oh I never read them, its all about the patterns". These people are fools.

Tangled

I've have been working on this luxury tweed slipover for a bit. It's going to be a birthday present for my flatmate (who taught me to knit - so it has to be neat!). I've done the back, which is just plain red/ navy st st which didn't make for any interesting photos, which is which is why I've not blogged about it before. Now I'm on the colour-work.

The yarn is lovely, and the pattern's ok but I'm never the biggest fan of intarsia. Especially as said-flatmate has taken my bobbins to Italy with her for a month, so I'm doing my best with small centre-pull balls. That patten book was hiding quite a mess.


But this is going slowly for reasons other than messy colour-work. I've got a huge deadline at the moment and my only knitting-time is on the bus to and from libraries. Intarsia on buses = silly, so I've got the second dna illusion sock on the go. If I manage to finish the document I'm working on, I'll be going to Fruitstock on Sunday - see you in the HipKnits section.

Till then, the content of these books are the only strands I'll be working on untangling. The initials "SSK" denote two things to me. "Slip, slip, knit" and "Sociology of Scientific Knowledge", its the latter I'm preoccupied with at present.