I finished my son's sweater some time ago, but finally got around to taking the photo and cropping it and uploading. He likes it, it's none too big but will probably last a while since kids of his age tend to grow up rather than out. There's a bit of pooling; I actually quite like the way it came out. The zig-zags somehow match the speed at which he usually hurtles around.
the front
the back
another photo of the front
I finally got around to getting the swatch photos off my camera, and doing the minor colour correction and cropping needed to put them online. So here you are, documentary evidence. The swatches were the most interesting part of the whole thing, I thought, so it wasn't a big problem to reknit them as required. Except for the seed stitch swatch, number 3, which was a slog.
| level 1 project - hat |  |
| Swatches 1 - 3 |  |
| Swatches 4 - 6 |  |
| Swatches 7 - 9 |  |
| Swatches 10 - 12 |  |
| Swatches 13 - 15 |  |
| Back of swatch 16 |  |
| Front of swatch 16 |  |
It's Saturday, and the boy is reading, the toddler amusing herself with this and that, and just maybe I'll have time to finish this post.
Somewhat later, after responding to toddler demands for a second breakfast...
I've finished the main knitting on the Baby Ull roses cardigan. I want to soak and block the body before cutting the armhole steeks, to see how much of the "embossing" effect I can get rid of. And at the moment I don't have the energy for all that and then the finishing, so it's resting. In the meantime I cast on for the Niebling Yahoo group KAL, the birch catkins doily. It's reasonably easy to knit so far (mind you, I'm only up to round 31); all the hints the group had have helped with that. I find I'm getting into the "one more round" trap of wanting to keep knitting, just to watch it grow. I can see why knitting Niebling doilies seems to be addictive, judging by the people on the list. Ours is not really a doily house, so I have no idea what to do with it once I have it finished. I guess that makes me a process knitter, at least for these.
Susanna Hansson is coming to town at the end of September, and I've signed up for the workshop. It calls for "Knitters with experience making mittens and doing complex colour work"; given I've only done the one stranded piece and never knitted mittens, I guess I should knit a pair before then! I'm thinking of the endpaper mitts, or maybe the new ones from Knitting Daily, depending on what I have in my stash.
Today was the day I finally shipped the TKGA Master Hand Knitting Level 1 box off to Zanesville, Ohio. I opted for the 10 business day postal dlivery at $21 rather than the 1 day at $90+, given that it will take 6-8 weeks for me to get the results anyway. So that means I can tell myself the day of reckoning won't be until late August or even early September. I wonder what the customs handlers will think of a declaration of "knitting swatches"?
I took photos of each swatch and the hat, and will post those later. Fortunately Ravelry now allows for slurping from my blog so I don't have to clutter up my Flickr feed with project photos. There were a lot of swatches, but those were fun (even if I did have to do a lot of practice swatches). Except for the seed stitch swatch, which was not fun.
The report on blocking was fine. I found the questions difficult to answer, since so much of what I do is because it feels right (using the intuitive side of my brain) and having to come up with the right words for explanations was a little tricky. I felt like I was trying to explain what I see, and wasn't sure whether I found the right vocabulary. Time will tell, I guess.
Anyway, so Level 1 is more or less done. I have no idea whether I'll pass or need to resubmit any of the swatches. If so, I hope the feedback is something I can understand and incorporate in the reknitting process, something to learn from.
At some stage I'll probably do the next level, but for now I have a few other projects in the queue.
All original content on this site is copyright © Lauren Wood.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.