Harlequin

 

Ta-da! I was determined to finish yesterday. I hoped to finish in daylight, but ended up sewing on buttons in the evening. I started work on the cardigan in mid-August, as you can read here. Regular readers of my blog will have seen my progress through the months. 

I finished up with a big pile of orts:

Most of the pieces are too short to be useful, but the longer bits work well as stitch markers. 

The cardigan is surprisingly heavy. The yarn is a thin cotton, but the cotton is tightly spun and of course is double for large areas of the knitting. I look forward to wearing it when the weather cools down a bit. 

Slow

 

You'd think that after all that tricky knitting, the band would go very quickly - it's only 11 stitches in one colour. Not so, but far otherwise, as Kipling would say. Partly that's because I've been busy with other things, like taking the car to the garage for a service. I'll get there eventually. 

The Hat

 

I've finished knitting a hat for an order. It's a bit darker than it looks on my screen. The pattern is Fishtail Hat Pattern by Knitamaniacs. It turns out that it's not a good idea to start such a project at a knit'n'natter session. The lace is easy enough, but needs to be set up correctly. Chatting while you knit the first row is a no-no. 

I'm now sewing my cardigan together, using black yarn and a lot of clips:

The Pieces

 

Right, I've finished knitting the main parts of my cardigan. There's still quite a lot to do - I must sew the pieces together and then knit the button band. I've got to take a break to make a hat ( spin and dye the wool and then knit ) but I'll come back to this as soon as the hat is ready. 

Not Done Yet

 

I had hoped to have finished knitting the sleeves of my cardigan by now, but the sleeve cap is much longer than I imagined. The decreases are quite complicated, so I can only work on it when I have my wits about me - no mindless knitting here. The other problem with the sleeve cap being longer than I realised, is that I've run out of pale yellow yarn. I looked through my stash and found a crocheted sample of a stitch I tried out. The yarn is a little thicker than the original but I think it'll work.

There are a couple of ladies in the knit'n'natter group I belong to who 'boast' about the number of almost finished projects they have. They say that they get so excited about the next project that they start it, without finishing the one they're on. I don't intend to join their number! I may have to take a detour to knit a hat for an order that has a deadline, but I definitely intend to finish the cardigan. 

Sleeve Progress

 

I was asked to show my knitting to the local quilting guild on Saturday, which I duly did. I'm not sure anyone was really interested, but there you go. I stayed for the meeting and learnt that there's a whole world of quilting terminology that I know nothing about. 

I'm making progress slowly on the sleeves of my cardigan. I had almost reached half way on the third row of boxes yesterday when I realised that I'd used the wrong colour for one diamond. If I'd gone much further, I'd probably have left it. With this many colours, would anyone notice? But the pattern is repetitive and one oddity could well catch the eye. Anyway, I undid several rows of one sleeve. I had a few moments of panic while unraveling - intarsia requires that threads be twisted at the change of colour, so they need to be untwisted when undoing. I corrected the mistake. Onward, onward. 

Revised

 

 One of the ladies in our knit and natter group asked me if I could sort out her knitting for her. She had downloaded a pattern for a child's pullover from the internet, but when she got to the right number of stitches at the top of the front, the front was much too long. Mmm.  The pattern is not very well written. Red flag number one was that the stitch gauge shows number of stitches per 4 inches, but not rows. In a raglan pattern, it's crucial that rows as well as stitches are correct.

 I said I'd undo her knitting to the armholes and rewrite the pattern with a set in sleeve instead of a raglan. There was a lot of scribbling on paper and referring to Design, Knit by Betty Barnden and Gabi Tubbs before I sat down at the  computer. Writing the pattern on the computer is easier than writing by hand because it's so easy to revise things. I thought Maureen could just use the original pattern for the sleeve, but then realised in the middle of the night that it would have the same problem as the front and the sleeves would be very long. I rewrote the sleeve section this morning. We have a knit and natter meeting this afternoon, so I should be able to give Maureen her knitting back with a revised pattern.