One of my friends is coming to NYC to celebrate a big birthday next week so I decided to knit Knitty Fetching wristwarmers. I was going to order some Andrean Silk from Knit Picks, but with their shipping times I wasn’t sure I’d get it in time. So as you can see below, I went to yarnware.com and got some cashmerino aran.
I am a magic looper so I had to pull something off my Denise 40″ cable to get started last night. The knitting went pretty quickly once I got a rhythm for the cabling. I can’t wait for my grooved cable needles to get here!
I think I should be able to finish this one up tonight. I’m liking it in general so far and I really like the cable ribbing. I may have to make some mittens!
I have a rather perverse habit of knitting things nearly to completion that I knew I was going to frog a quarter of the way in. It’s often that I just want to see how it would turn out even though there’s something about it I hate.
So yesterday was an example of my perverse knitting. I’m working on knitting an earflap hat for a friend. I’ve done beanies but never earflaps. I don’t want to do them in garter, but I knew that stockinette would curl. So I used my google fu and came up with ….the Earflap Hat Pattern Generator!
I swatched and gauged and all that jazz and started knitting. I didn’t do the increases. Instead I cast on the final amount of stitches (post increase) and knit the inner band on size 9 needles, then switched to 10.5s on the outer part of the hat. I just got the hang of short rows on the socks I’m working on, so it was pretty easy to do the short row earflaps for this hat. It’s a clever way of doing them too. However after finishing them I knew they were too small. Yes, they were big enough to cover your ears, but they were not in proportion to the hat. But I kept knitting to see how they looked overall. Then I marked where they should be and frogged.
Then I stared over again last night. Originally it was 78 stitches – 12 for the back, 18 for each earflap and 30 in the front. I wanted it to be a bit bigger so I started with 84 stitches – 14 for the back, 26 for each earflap and 18 for the front. I just started the first earflap so I’ll have to see if that works out.
I tried really hard to resist this, but last night I started working on a pair of socks. I am currently about halfway done with knitting Temptation II, and I really shouldn’t start a new project. Except, the sweater is a commute exclusive project. So starting an at home one must be ok, right?
I’ve never knit socks before so I did some searching for a pattern. I’m using my Dye-O-Rama Yarn from Liz. She said the stripes work well with a 60 stitch round. So when I came across Wendy’s Toe-Up Sock pattern I was all like SCORE! So I cast on and got going and 2 rows in I got confused, very confused. I’ve never really done short rows, and I knew that I had to be slipping more and knitting less, but I couldn’t understand how that works. So I searched and read and searched and read. And finally I came across this tutorial. So I basically ignored the instructions, which I think are not very clearly written for an “easy” pattern, and followed the Coffee Crazy instructions. So right now I’m done with the first toe. I just need to put my provisional cast on stitches back on the needle.
So I got back on the horse working on Temptation II. I had started it for the knitting olympics but I messed up a bunch so I decided to start from scratch. Plus I picked up some Addi Turbos for this project too. So far I’ve been working on it for a week and I’ve gotten about 15% done. I have 5 of the 13″ of ribbing I need to do for the body.
