KNITSTER

Hello Knitsters!

It’s been a while since any of us posted, but let’s face it– spring is upon us. And does that mean we stop knitting? Of course not! Heck, in fact, we might be knitting maniacs right now, too busy to write. (Yeah, and it could be that we are just plain busy too!)

Well, you all remember the Flaming sweater than went down in flames? The replacement sweater, knit all in red, is done. Correction: it’s 99% done. And I’m a dweeb because I don’t want to take a picture of it until it’s 100% done. It’s been finished for almost 2 weeks already, except for one thing– the zipper. It’s a zippered cardigan, after all. I did have some problems with it too. I had wanted to follow the pattern for most of it, meaning the last part was picking up stitches along the front and the hood, and normally you’d have buttonholes on one side of the front. But I was opting just to skip the buttonholes and just make the ribbed edge, and it would look great. Now, we all know that I suck at picking up stitches. But this time, I kinda found a pattern within the stitches there where I could pick them up in a patterned way rather than a random way. Great, right? Wrong. I only had 6-7 rows to do, so you’d think that wouldn’t be bad, even if it was 250+ stiches per row. That’s fine, no problem, so I thought. Wrong. There were BIG gaps between where I picked up and started knitting. BIG HOLES. Consistent holes. Being that I made it out of cheap acrylic yarn, I think it got stretched, but naturally it didn’t stretch back. As Spongebob would say, “BARNACLES!” So, I frogged out that whole section after doing about 3 rows, and took a slightly different approach. First, after re-picking up the stitches, I knit a baseline of garter stitches, and along the way, I even did a K1M1, which doubled the stitches, but seemed to tighten up that gap, so I thought. Sure enough, when I went to do that second pass/row and start the patterning, the gaps were opening up again. Not as big, but still significant enough. Blasted! So, I asked Drew if he cared about having the ribbing along the hood and all, and he said, nah, it was fine with him. GOOD.

Now, I’ve recently started up with a new hobby, much related to this– sewing. (I’m getting my first machine on Tuesday– got it on eBay. Oh, and I’m starting a sewing blog as well– Windsornot’s Threads. But anyway….) Rather than have the semi-disaster that I had in sewing in the zipper by hand again, like I did with JC’s sweater, I decided that I want to machine sew in the zipper this time. Problem is, I haven’t figured out/learned how to do that yet. So, the sweater sits here on my desk, along with the zipper, waiting for the parts to come together. That zipper is the 1% I haven’t done yet. It’s otherwise ready to go.

I’m such a dweeb. Like I said, I don’t want to photograph it until it’s ALL the way done. So there you go– I do have an FO, it’s just in hiding. :-S I think I have to learn how to put that zipper in soon, or if not, hand sew it in before Spring flies by and he can’t wear it! I will say that it does look pretty decent. I’ve had Drew try it on, and he’s happy with it so far. I did make it a little bit bigger so that it will still fit him in the fall, should he have a growth sprurt on me over the summer (he usually does!).

I promise I’ll have pics soon. Really.

My next project in knitting is that I hope to make a toy for Drew. He got in trouble this week at school, so I wasn’t exactly in the mood to knit something fun for him if he was being a rotten kid. So maybe I’ll start it soon. I’m taking the Errol pattern from Charmed Knits, (hence, making a toy owl), but instead of Errol, I’m making Harry’s owl, Hedwig. I have the cheap white yarn, and I found this fun fur type yarn that actually looks feathery, so that should look pretty cool. We’ll see if I have enough of that stuff! I think I do.

Tune in soon, and maybe you’ll see something exciting!

Posted on April 17th, 2008 by Dani
Filed under: Finished Objects, Works in Progress