The scarf is knitted from her own hand-spun, with beads on the end. The colour is more blue-gray, like in the top left photo. One of the chocolate bars has chili pepper and cinnamon, the other coconut macadamia curry (yep, really). Four types of tea: lavender, winter fruit spice, vanilla, and rose congou. Hand-made stitch markers. And, to top it off, a pattern for Sivia Harding’s Shetland Garden Faroese Shawl. I feel blessed and very lucky!

My friend did love the shawl when I gave it to her, and used it to bring the baby home from the hospital in. It’s warm, light, and machine-washable.

I took the photos while the shawl was blocking. I haven’t figured out how to photograph large objects yet, so you get a bunch of photos of parts of it. It looks quite a lot like the photos in the published pattern, so you can get an idea there how the whole thing looks.

Learning experience notes: I should have thought about how to make the final grafting easier before beginning the edge. There are techniques for this (such as knitting a couple of rows in scrap yarn before beginning) that would have helped. It took a lot of work to make the graft anywhere close to invisible.

I found a good post on how to block mittens. The template plastic was easy to find in a local quilting store. You can see the template plastic poking out of the mitts in the photos.

The workshop concept sounds deceptively simple: come prepared with stitch dictionaries and figure out how best to fill the triangle shape with appropriate stitch patterns. It’s harder than it sounds, but Sivia made it seem, not quite easy, but reasonably straight-forward, with lots of places to make artistic design decisions.

Sivia has some wonderful designs and brought some of her shawls for us to admire and deconstruct, using them as teaching examples. She gave us ideas on how to start the shawls, various ways of finishing them, how to modify stitch patterns to fit nicely into the triangle shape, when and how to fudge stitch patterns to make the entire pattern easier to understand and knit, and lots of other tips. Everyone ended up with charts and swatches, and undoubtedly lots more ideas than they started with. Now all I have to do is finish the design I started (I want to change a couple of things), complete the charts, and start knitting!

First up is a sweater I knitted for my husband in Jean Wong’s Level 2 knitting class (a simplified version of the Nihon Vogue course). The requirements are for a round-neck sweater; my husband picked the yarn colour and the simple k3, p1 rib pattern. The rest was customised to his measurements. The ribbing around the neck, waist, and arms is k1p1 on smaller needles.

I used Elann’s Coto Canapone, a cotton/hemp yarn that shrinks when washed. Fortunately you do things properly for knitting class, so I did wash and block the gauge swatch. I made the body a little too long but am hoping it will shrink a little when washed again. I also made the ribbing around the neckline a little too deep; next time I’d make it only half the width. The yarn is hard on your hands while knitting, but does knit up really nicely and should wear well (my husband is hard on clothes). It’s also a reasonable price, and is machine-washable.

Yarn: Elann Coto Canapone, 20 skeins

Needles: 3.5 for the body, 3.25 for the ribbing

Pattern: my own, based on k3p1 rib for the boddy and k1p1 ribbing

Comments: the yarn shrinks when washed

Dates: Started September 13 2008, completed November 12 2008

Ravelry link: http://www.ravelry.com/projects/laurendw/ribbed-mens-sweater

Brown Men's Sweater