KnitMe

Autumn Rose

is finished!

It fits pretty well, too - the sleeves are a little narrower than I'd like, but with this Knitpicks Palette yarn being smoother to the touch than Shetland, I can wear it with just a camisole underneath. I'm happy with the depth of the neckline too. If I were to do it again I would knit one more round with black before setting the neck steek, as I think it looks slightly odd to have the gold blend up into the neckband like that - it needs the extra row of black to finish off the horizontal band there.

I agree with whoever on Ravelry said they had a slight problem with pooching in front where the raglan seams meet the neckline - I think it is the nature of the way the pattern is put together, and it's not very noticeable when being worn.

I did two fewer rows of ribbing on the neckband because I was down to the last couple of yards of Garnet Heather and I was not about to order another ball! If you want to make ANY size other than 35 inch you will need two balls of Palette in that color. This is all I had left:

I had a ton left of all the other colors, though.

I wore it last week with black pants and it was pretty classy. I have plenty of huge, floppy sweaters that are pleasant to wear but it's nice to have a couple of things that have a little shape.

I started this on December 6th, and blocked it on February 11th.

Kitty Knits

I want to repeat the announcement I made last Thursday, that KnitMe is going to be a stop on Donna Druchunas's blog tour for her new book Kitty Knits. We will be having a conversation with Donna here on Thursday February 28th about the book, the yarn, and her cats, among other things. Please join us.

Outsmarting myself, episode 6,329

In preparation for Donna's visit I started a quick project from the book, the Felted Carpet Bag. One great thing about it is that it is using up yarn from my stash, and lots of it.

I actually had stash of one of the colors of Galway called for, the sky blue, and I have a huge batch of anonymous cream worsted that seems to me to be almost the same as Galway. I substituted a different shade of Galway for the green grass section, and some grey handspun shetland for the cat itself. Yes it's intarsia. I don't mind intarsia if I know I'm going to felt the finished piece to hide all the weaknesses...

The outsmarting-self part has to do with the grey. I couldn't handle any more balls of yarn - 6 was about enough to manage - so I figured I would wind the required grey yarn into balls that were two strands held together. It made the knitting really easy, but it leaves me with a huge amount of yarn left that is balled together double-stranded that I don't need. Sigh. I guess I will enlist Emily's help and we will try to wind two separate balls out of each one center pull ball.

Sorry for the technical difficulties that have essentially prevented anyone from commenting since last week sometime (although I'm sure the spammers had no trouble)., We think it's all resolved now.

Posted by Prudence at February 18, 2008 01:47 PM