Tag Archives: sweater

Making it up

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6

I just can’t be without some knitting project.  I am addicted to yarn and sticks.  After finishing the last project, I couldn’t bring myself to work on the Bacardi Cardi just yet.  Concentration is needed for the color charts and all those yarns hanging off the sides.

My plan is to knit a top-down, circular yoke, seamless sweater.  For.  Me.  Like this:

Or this:

Using these two colors of yarn that were…wait for it…

…on sale.  654 yards of Debbie Bliss Mia in Mallard (green) and 545 yards of Aqua.

I searched and searched the interwebs and Ravelry for a simple top-down circular, seamless adult-sized sweater.  I found the Knitting Fiend Yoke-u-lator and plugged in my numbers.  Voila!  A simple pattern for the math.

I’m also using Ann Budd’s The Knitter’s Handy Book of Top-Down Sweaters 

…and the February Baby Sweater on Two Needles from Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitters Almanac because I need more detailed instructions.

My granddaughter’s green sweater is the February Baby Sweater on two needles and the taupe and tan sweater for my grandson is a combination of the February Baby Sweater and the Knitting Fiend calculations.

There is not enough of one color of either so this sweater will be two colors.  Not sure if that means evenly spaced stripes, unevenly spaced stripes, color blocks, or something different.  I’m just making it up as I go.

Kindness

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10

I haven’t abandoned the socks but I took your advice and decided to step back (haha) from that project for now.  And I’m still debating about what to do with the Which Way Now shawl.

The Bacardi Cardi is ripped back part way and on my radar.  That sweater will be finished this spring (or summer), however, I need something different on my needles. Right.  Now.

Enter Kindness.

The garter tab start is new for me and I really liked how the beginning few rows look.  No bump.  Trust me, there is no bump.  All the stitches just blend right in.  

The yarn is Knit Picks Chroma Fingering in the beautiful Galápagos colorway (which is not available anymore). Soft blues morph into greens and cream and back out again.

I would be farther along with this but I decided to convert the directions into a table with row-by-row stitch counts included in the far right column.  It was a bit tedious and I don’t have all the stitch counts at the end of the rows as I am new to reading and deciphering lace charts to see how the count changes.  This concept is used by Helen Stewart and the Spindrift Shawl pattern and it really helped me especially when the stitch counts changes every row.

I think this lovely little shawlette will be just the thing to get my confidence back.

 

 

 

Digging into my stash

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6

After my SSSK socks, I needed something else fun and colorful to knit.  So I dug into my stash and came up with this fun yarn by Berroco.

This cotton/acrylic/nylon blend yarn, an Aran weight, is Calico in color 1829. Unfortunately it’s discontinued now but I checked on Ravelry and several people still have some in their stash, too.  I know I bought it on sale years ago with no idea of a project what-so-ever.  I just liked it.  Eight balls of 90 yards isn’t enough to make much but that’s all that was available.  The matte red and coral colors are on one side of the strand and the shiny blue, green, gold and orange colors run down the other side so when it’s knitted up, the yarn twists and makes an interesting fabric.

I searched through Ravelry for patterns as well as magazines, old books and booklets and found nothing I loved in that yarn weight and yardage.  So after swatching, I took elements from two patterns to make my own.  Lace Hem Topping and Drops 90-18.

The back is finished.    No color pooling, just fun.

Above is one side using the stockinette stitch and below is the reverse.

 

Redo, redone

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4

I couldn’t gift an item that was sub par so I removed one button/snap band, lined up the ridges and snaps and sewed it back on.

I feel better even though I’m sure the Birthday Girl didn’t care.  I did.

The color is hard to capture on camera but the above picture is pretty close to the actual color. I try to include a care tag and a bit of extra yarn with all my gifted items.  It also shows how many stitches are in the item.  The gifts weren’t opened before we left so no pictures of the model and sweater.