Serrano Cardigan – Knitting Box

Where are they now?

I think it’s about time I do an update on my knitting WIPs. With the weather getting really cold, I found myself reaching more into my knitting again. And there have been some new projects that haven’t even made an appearance on this blog. So lets take a look, shall we?

Melon shawl

Last we saw her, she was just starting out, at the beginning of Project Spectrum’s yellow pink and green months. Puts me to shame, really, two months have passed and I’m not even halfway with her yet. Not that it’s overly complicated or anything. In fact the pattern is quite easy to memorise, manageable enough for knitting in front of the TV. I just get distracted easily… (you’ll see). I know the lace doesn’t look like much here, crumpled up like this, so here’s a close up of it stretched out.

Serrano

Speaking of Project Spectrum, the theme colours now are red, black and metallics. So it’s probably a good time to dig up my black Serrano cardi in progress and dust her off. (The pattern is from here.)

I started this so long ago it’s embarassing. When I last left her, I have just finished one sleeve (I decided to start with sleeves first), and now I’ll get on to the second sleeve. Why not work on the body now, I hear you ask? Well, because the needles that I need (80 cm/32″ 2.5mm circulars) are being used for something else (see below projects). Turns out I really really like my 2.5mm Addi Turbo needles. Perhaps I should get my needles to multi task like this 😉 Hmm, might be too complicated perhaps, with two socks involved.

Stripey socks

I bought a skein of Heirloom Jigsaw sock yarn from Tapestry Craft because I was taken by this colourway (it’s #54, the pink/white striping). It’s not as soft as STR, but it’s okay, and the striping is keeping me interested. I’m just making a plain stockinette socks, cuff down, but with short row heels for a change. I started knitting this with DPNs, but I had unsightly ladders problem. So I thought I’d try out magic looping. I have tried magic looping only once before (it was for making this baby hat) when I was still new to knitting, and it wasn’t a very good experience. On hindsight, it was probably because I wasn’t using the right needles. The cord of the needles that I used back then wasn’t very flexible at all and I couldn’t get an even tension. For this sock I used my Addi Turbos (yep, that 2.5mm one) and it worked like a charm. No ladders at all! The flexible cord of the Addi Turbos really made a difference. And magic looping turns out to be simple too! There’s an excellent video tutorial here that explains the method very well.

So I’ve got one sock down, but I’m knitting another sock first before returning to knit its mate…

Jaywalkers

A lot of people have been through the Jaywalker craze. I love the look of the zigzag-y stripes and I wanted to make my own too, except that I didn’t have a suitable yarn. Now I do.

This is Jaywalkers in STR lightweight, G-Rocks colourway. As I knit this I can’t help thinking that it would’ve been such a great yarn to use for the previous Project Spectrum colours (yellow, pink and green, all in one!) I’m making my jaywalkers with picot trim instead of the ribbing, inspired by Anna’s jaywalkers.

And yep, I’m using the 2.5mm Addi Turbos for this sock, for magic-looping. I really like magic-looping now, I think it might just become my method of choice for sock knitting.

And that pretty much brings us up to date with the state of my knitting WIPs!

11 June 2007

A rocky beginning

At the moment I’m finding myself in a very rare situation where I really love all the WIPs that I’m working on right now, and I want to work on all of them all the time! Hmm, odd, huh? If only I had the time to knit all the time… So I’ve been trying to rotate my WIPs so that I get to work on a bit of each of them. But even so, I think Serrano is my favourite at the moment. When I’m working on it, I find it really hard to put it down.

I debated with myself whether I should do a swatch first or not. Thoughts running through my head like this: “I want to start RIGHT NOW!” “But what if your gauge is way off? It could be too baggy, or doesn’t fit at all!” “But, but, it’s lace. I’ll have to block it anyway, I can block it to measurements…” “Still, what if it’s all wrong, you’ll have to frog like 200 stitches!!”

And then, light bulb moment! I’ll start with the sleeve! And since Serrano has a split cuff, each half knitted separately before being joined, it’s only half a cuff to start with. I can call that a swatch!!

And so I did, and good thing I did that, too, because it turned out that I made horrible mistakes in the process of making that “swatch”. First was because I didn’t pay attention to the pattern instruction that says “When there are not enough stitches to complete both a yo and its paired decrease, work these stitches in stockinette stitch.” and did the yarn-over anyway, only to discover 12 rows later, that I had 6 stitches too many. Frog, frog. Then not long after I had to frog again, this time because I decided to compare my little swatch to the pattern designer’s stitch pattern close up on the website, and discovered this:

Left: Mine (not fully stretched yet), Right: How it’s meant to be.

See how in my swatch on the left, the pattern repeats are further apart from each other, compared to how it’s meant to be? Well, turned out that I misread the chart. You see, in the chart, the pattern repeat is 7 stitches, plus 4 stitches extra. The 7 stitches repeat is outlined in red. But as it happened, I printed out the pattern with my black and white printer, and didn’t see the red outline. So I happily knitted and knitted, thinking that the pattern repeat is 11 stitches wide, and the result is what you saw above. Sigh.

Thankfully after that it was quite smooth sailing, and I think my gauge is ok too. Here’s what the sleeve looks like now. This is not stretched out to full capacity yet, only stretched a bit so that you can see the lace pattern.

13 October 2006

Purchases

Yarn purchases!

Went to Tapestry Craft yesterday to get these yarns… That’s Debbie Bliss Cashmerino in olive colour for making another pair of Fetching, this time for me, and the black ones are Grinasco Bambi, for making Serrano from Knitty. I’ve been wanting a lacy cardigan for a long time, and Serrano looks very appealing to me.

I must say that the colour, black, is a rather unadventurous choice for me. I tend to wear dark colours a lot, even though I actually like just about any colour in the spectrum. I had considered other colours, just to have something different. I spent ages and ages in front of the Grinasco Bambi shelf, trying to decide on a colour. But in the end I settled on black. Oh well, hopefully that will mean that I’ll get to wear it a lot. Black is still the new black, right??

On the way home, I popped in to Dymocks to check out their crafts books section. And oh my do they have a lot of great books there! I could spend hours there just browsing through them. I bought this book:

It’s Toys to Sew by Claire Garland, the author of Knitted Babes. It has patterns for dolls along similar vein to Knitted Babes — basic doll patterns (two boys and two girls) with sets of clothing items to mix and match, except that in this book the dolls are sewn as opposed to knitted. Which is great as I’ve been wanting to sew more. There are also many other adorable toys in the book — patchwork crocodile, turtle, spotty pull-along elephant, and even a tea set! The toys are sooo cute and I want to make so many of them! (Interestingly, when I got home and looked at Amazon US’s page for this book, the book is not released yet in the US. And I got it here for less than fifteen bucks! I love it when I get a good bargain…) I have pictures of some pages from the book here, if anyone’s interested.

1 October 2006