FO: Grassy Green Top-Down

I have a new jumper. Or rather, a new tunic. I bought the yarn (rowan cashcotton) in a sale last year, and decided the soft tweediness would be best served with a plan stocking stitch top-down raglan. It has quite baggy three-quarter length sleeves, lots of side-shaping and folded-over seams. Other than that, it's plain vanilla all the way. Full details on the project's ravelry page. 

I still just under two balls of the yarn left-over. I was contemplating giving it pockets, similar to Norah Gaughan's Kaari, but I'm not sure how flattering it'd be. I was also thinking about embroidering a tree silhouette in brown wool over the top of the tunic's front, but I like the simplicity of it as it is. Or, I could use the spare yarn to covert this into a proper dress. Or I might just stripe the couple of balls of green and brown yarns I have in my stash into some legwarmers. 

I'll see. Right now, I'm going to put my feet up with a bottle of Guinness, Dr Who and some cabling.

FO: Sunshine Cardigan

I'm a big cardigan wearer - party because I enjoy conforming to the academic cliché, but also because they are so convenient for layering warmth and letting your Summer/ Autumn wardrobe extend into colder months. The ultimate transition garment.

A few months ago I started to have a hankering for a yellow, dk-weight cardigan. I had an idea for a perfect garment in my head, but it was very vague and, probably because my standards were so high, I kept changing my mind. I cast on for a top-down raglan. Then bottom-up with set-in sleeves, then top-down again with a different design. I played with cable, lace, cable again, frogging and re-knitting just to frog again. Kirsty still hasn't stopped teasing me about how many times this thing was knitted.



Eventually, I settled on a simple top-down raglan with a basketweave boarder, a bit of side shaping, slipped stitch edges, an applied button band and double-sided sleeves you can wear up (for working) or down (to keep hands snuggly warm).



I had thought about submitting it to knitty, but the deadline day came and we didn't have internet access. Plus the light's been rubbish and I didn't feel there were good enough photos. Most of all I felt that, for all the pattern's finishing touches, the design was too simple. Basic patterns on knitty annoy me, I figured why add to it? I have the pattern written up though, so I'll post it here if anyone interested.



Yarn: cygnet superwash double-knit wool in 'gold', 8 balls.
Needles: 3.25mm circ, 3.75 circ (both 80cm).
Buttons: 11 of the big brown ones (from Liberty, 75p each... but worth it) and 7 smaller ones to stabilise them (from John Lewis, in a pre-packed box - these are cheap plastic basic buttons for mending your trousers).
Ravelled: here.



This last picture was taken at my very favourite part of London; the Science and Art staircase the Victoria and Albert Museum. Not many people realise, but the Science Museum used to be inside the V&A building, back when it was simply the 'South Kensington Museum' and basically the left-overs from the 1851 Great Exhibition. The science collections were booted out to the west side of the stree around the turn of the century; the main exteriour of the V&A built around the old duel-use building. So although the outside of the building is overtly arts and crafts, you'll find a more mixed set of iconography in the interiour. The art and science sections were connected (and demarcated from one another) with a gorgeous ceramic staircase covered in the letters 'S' and 'A'. The V&A, conscious that their own building is one of the prize pieces of their collection, maintain this staircase, but I think most visitors today just walk through it, perhaps thinking its particularly pretty, maybe wondering why Galileo's name is worked into the design.

EDIT, see the pattern: