Some time ago I promised our son that I would knit him a sweater. He picked the pattern, and the yarn, picking something (of course) in a fine yarn that took seemingly forever to finish. However, finish it I did, eventually.
The pattern is Alice Starmore's Fife, from the Fishermen's Sweaters book. It comes in one size only, for an eight-year-old, so it's a little big on him right now, but won't be by next winter. There's a picture at the virtual yarns web site, which is a show case for the Starmore designs (and sells kits and yarn). I knitted my version in Cleckheaton Machine Wash 5-ply Crepe, which I got in Australia last time we were there. They don't seem to have the same colour any more for that yarn. For once in my life I got perfect gauge on the recommended needles! Both stitch and row gauges matched, which made knitting a lot easier - no calculating changes in increases and decreases to match a differing row gauge.
So here's the sweater, nicely laid out on my new wooly board (great for drying knitted sweaters), photographed on a nice spring day in our back yard.
Originally published on Anyway, my other blog.
All that being said, here's my first blog entry on the subject of crafts, my version of item 5443 in a pattern book called Inspiration 75. One would think that a book that calls itself "inspiration" could come up with inspired names for the patterns within it, rather than just numbers. In the book the top looks like the image on the left. Instead of the recommended yarn, I used 