Knitting and Photography

I've just been updating my projects on Ravelry, and apparently I have completed 40 projects since I started knitting in 2005. Does that seem like a lot? And that doesn't even include all the things I've unravelled, or the things I'm knitting right now!

Here are my two most recent knitting photographs:

The jacket on the left is Murmur, from Rowan's The Next Big Thing book. Sadly it's another one of those unfortunate incidents you often find when knitting or sewing - you spend lots of time, money and effort making a thing, only to discover when it's finished that you don't like it, or it doesn't suit you.

So, it fits chest 36-40", and it's for sale! £40, or I'll happily trade for 6 balls of Colinette Point 5. Any colourway, I'm not fussy. ;)

The purple scarf on the right is The Yarn Harlot's One Row Handspun Scarf. It will shortly be going up on Etsy for $30/£15, unless anyone really wants to grab it first?

I appreciate that it's not really scarf weather, which is why I also took some photos of my most recent little felted bag. It's in the same colourway as the jacket above, but I could not for the life of me get a good photograph of it.

Paul's gone off to America with work, and he didn't want to take his SLR with him, so I've lent him my little compact camera for the week. To begin with I was quite excited about playing around with Paul's Canon EOS 350D. And then I tried to use it. Ugh, what a pain!

For a start off, it weighs a ton, which is not very useful when you've got a sore wrist. Then I discovered that Paul had left the 70 mm macro lens attached, which is no use at all when you're trying to take a picture of a whole jumper! I managed to change the lens to a 55-200 mm one, and discovered that I still had to stand approximately eighty-seven miles away from the jumper if I wanted it to be in focus. I also have a headache from squinting through the viewfinder.

I think the only thing I liked about using this camera was the short depth of field you get from these particular lenses. I can only achieve that with my camera when it's on the macro or super-macro settings, and then it won't focus if you're more than 20-100 mm away from the subject.

Obviously my little Pentax Optio A30 has its limitations. It's fiddly to focus it manually, you can't change the lens, and it doesn't shoot in RAW format if you want to fiddle with your photos in an artistic manner after you've taken them. But I love the large screen instead of a viewfinder, I love that you can choose to use all of the settings manually if you want to, and the super-macro setting is very good. (The "face recognition" software is rubbish though.)

Paul and I went for another walk round the lake yesterday, and Paul took some more lovely photos of birds. I was feeling quite envious of his camera and photography skills, and went back through some of my old pictures to find ones that I'd taken with the film SLR. There were some lovely ones in there, but I think I've taken some much nicer photos with my little Optio than I ever did with my old SLR.

In fact, my old Olympus OM10 (Quartz) has been sitting under the bed, mostly unused in the last ten years. Perhaps it's time to dig it out and sell it on.

The green cardigan's almost finished!

I've been trying to knit a cardigan with this green Rowanspun Chunky for ages. It started out last year as the Nicky Epstein Cardigan with Cabled Points, but the pattern made me so cross that I unravelled the whole thing in a fit of pique. I'd made it all the way through the back, both sleeves and half of the left front, so it wasn't a decision to be taken lightly. That was a heck of a lot of knitting to undo!

In the middle of March I decided to embrace the ways of Ann Budd, and write my own pattern.

I feel as though I've been working on this forever, probably because I've been knitting with this yarn since September, but it's actually taken about ten weeks from writing the pattern to finishing the cardigan. I've also had a good few weeks where I didn't knit at all because of my wonky wrist.

As this is the first pattern I've written myself (except for the pink scarf, which wasn't quite as complicated!), I really wasn't certain how it would come out. Thankfully, I'm really pleased with it!

Here you can see me wondering whether the edges will actually meet, so I can put the zip in.
(The answer's yes, it's very stretchy!)

The only thing I would change is the fit of the armscye. Ann Budd's measurements are quite generous in this area and I prefer a more fitted style, so I'll be making the sleeve head a bit smaller in my next pattern. Otherwise, the waist shaping is in the right place, the measurements are spot on, and I'm really pleased!



In other news, the Ebay saga continues.

The buyer who was bidding on my boots but had the "non paying bidder" feedback has now been formally removed from Ebay, and her bids have been cancelled. Hoorah!

This is, of course, great! Justice has been served, and all that. However, it does mean that I've just lost twenty quid's worth of bids on my boots. , maybe you'll grab a bargain! ;)

My First Socks!

After knitting six gloves over Christmas (two pairs and two half-pairs), I decided the time was right for me to make my first foray into socks.

I still hate loathe and detest wrangling with a handful of double-pointed needles, so I decided to find a pattern that I could knit using just two knitting needles, like a normal person. ;P

Sox on 2 Stix, from Knitty turned out to be the solution.

Nicola had given me two balls of Louisa Harding Kimono Angora for Christmas, so that seemed perfect for making a pair of really luxurious first socks.

The pattern is begun at the heel. You work short rows to make the heel cup, knit down to the toes, work the short rows again, and then knit your way back up the instep. Then you knit your way around the ankle, until the leg of the socks is as long as you want it to be. Seam the sides, et voila! Socks!

I decided to make tiny little short socks, as they're the kind that I wear most often, and they go nicely inside my summer shoes. I had a few issues along the way, mostly with the short row shaping leaving enormous great holes in the toes and heels! It didn't seem to matter how I wrapped and turned, the holes still appeared, so I fixed this in the time-honoured fashion of darning the toes as I was sewing up the seams. I left the holes in the heels, as they actually look quite pretty, and they aren't uncomfortable to wear.

I also discovered that after I'd cast off the first sock, I couldn't get my foot inside it! I have a high instep and I tend to cast off very tight, which turned out to be a bad combination. Fortunately I was able to undo the cast off and try again, but this did leave the socks quite loose around the ankle. Next time I think I might try 1x1 ribbing for the cuff instead of 2x2, and matters would definitely be improved by using a yarn with a bit more natural stretch to it.

So far I've only worn these socks for padding around the house. Kimono Angora isn't really an appropriate sock yarn, and I know that as soon as I put these inside a pair of shoes I'll wear straight through the toes. They're amazingly soft and fluffy and comforting though, so these are definitely for those rainy weekends when you're curling up on the sofa with a weepy film and a big bar of chocolate.

I also discovered the hard way that, thankfully, Kimono Angora doesn't felt! I'd managed to scoop the socks into the machine with the rest of the laundry, and I gave a little shriek when they fell out, all wet and sorry for themselves. They had shrunk a little bit, but I put them on my feet immediately and padded around squelchily in the kitchen for a few minutes, and thank goodness they're fine.

I'd like to knit some more of these, to go with all of my summer skirts, so what I need now is some recommendations for DK weight sock yarn. I like self-patterning or variegated colours the best, but I really would prefer DK to 4-ply for this pattern.

Any suggestions?

Simply Knitting.

I miss knitting. I haven't done any for ages, because I've hurt my wrist. It's driving me mad - how are you supposed to watch films and TV, if you can't knit at the same time?

This month's Simply Knitting magazine has just plopped onto my doormat, and now I miss knitting more than ever! I didn't blog about Issue 41, because none of the patterns particularly grabbed me. (I was very excited about the shiny blue chunky cable needles though!) Issue 42 has a couple of patterns which appeal to me a great deal, and I am currently bemoaning the fact that I don't have any aran weight wool in my stash.

Okay, I lied. I do have some aran weight wool. It's Debbie Bliss Soho, which is multicoloured, and I think the twisted cables on the front of Kirstie McLeod's pretty cardigan pattern would disappear in such a loud yarn. I need something simple and plain, for this one. Simply Knitting are very naughty - the magazine includes a free pack of three lovely wooden buttons, which of course are perfect for this pattern! So, of course, I now need to go out and buy some wool.

I've just realised, in fact, that I've made it five months into 2008 without buying any wool at all! (Well, one lonely ball for the Kool Aid experiment, but that hardly counts.) I went on a shopping spree in the John Lewis sale at the end of last year, and bought a veritable mountain of wool that I haven't even touched yet. (Stupid wrist.) If you're a member of Ravelry, you can see what I'm hiding in my stash. I thought I had very specific plans for each of my stashed yarns, but of course I keep changing my mind. Oh, and I knitted a pair of socks from the Louisa Harding Kimono Angora, which I completely forgot to show you!

The other pattern that I really like from this issue of Simply Knitting is a child's jumper. It's taken from Bergere de France's Tricot Baby magazine 510, and it has a little viking on the front! Bless him! Not having any children to knit for, I wonder whether Paul would like a big jumper, with a little viking on the front...?

A Knitting Milestone.

This weekend contained a knitting milestone. For the first time ever, my Mum phoned me to ask for knitting advice!

This is a marked improvement from a conversation we had about two years ago, when I was knitting a small swatch so that my Mum could show me some different types of increases.

Mum: What are you doing?
Me: Knitting...
Mum: No you're not!

Turns out I'd been knitting through the back loop all along, which was why I couldn't get a kfb increase to work. Still, I'd managed to throw together two jumpers that way, and they looked alright... ;)



Issue 40 of Simply Knitting dropped through my letterbox on Saturday, and it has a pattern for the most gorgeous long mohair jumper. ("Spook" from Rowan Magazine 43 - although Simply Knitting has much nicer pictures!) It takes 5 balls of Kidsilk Haze in my size, although I am extremely tempted to go out and buy four more skeins of magenta Colinette Parisienne instead.

My only concern is that I've tried knitting with Parisienne before, and I absolutely loathed it. I'm used to knitting on large needles (6.5mm and up) with chunky wool, so knitting mohair on 3.5mm needles felt like wrestling spiderwebs and gave me cramp in my hands. The question is, do I want to wear this jumper enough to be able to put up with the horrors of knitting it...?

Moss-stitch trim zip-up cardigan.

The Dreaded Lurgy keeps striking me down in sudden and annoying ways, so I have mostly spent the weekend quietly knitting.

The first part of the weekend was spent unravelling, when I realised that I couldn't bear to knit another stitch on the Cardigan with Cabled Points, and I was no longer certain that I actually wanted to wear it even if I did force myself to get it finished. So, I made the executive decision to unravel the whole thing.

I still wanted to knit a zip-fronted cardigan, but I decided to go for something a lot simpler. No pointy bits, no cabling on rows that didn't line up, just a simple fitted cardigan.

Having turned to Ann Budd for help, I managed to get this far:

I've typed the pattern out below, for a size 36" chest. Once the cardigan's finished, I'll write out the pattern in more sizes and make it available, probably as a PDF file. It should work with any chunky weight wool.

I haven't checked the pattern for any glaring errors yet, mostly because I haven't finished knitting it! I'll make edits as I go along, if I find anything that's difficult to follow.

If you decide to follow the pattern and find anything odd about it, please let me know!


Moss Stitch Trim Zip-Up Cardigan

Wool used - RowanSpun Chunky, approximately 525 metres.
Any chunky weight yarn should work out fine, as long as the gauge is correct.
7.5mm straight needles.
12 stitches and 18 rows to 4 inches.

The pattern below is for a finished chest measurement of 36".

Back
Cast on 54 sts
Moss stitch for 10 rows
St st until piece measures 6"
Dec 1 st at each end of next and foll alt row*
Work 5 rows even
Inc 1 st at each end of next and foll alt row
Work even until piece measures 13"
Armhole Shaping
Cast off 3 sts at beg of next 2 rows
Cast off 2 sts at beg of next 2 rows
Dec 1 st at each end of next and foll alt row
Work even on 40 sts until armhole measures 8½"
Shoulder Shaping
Cast off 5 sts at beg of next 4 rows
Cast off rem 20 sts for back neck

Left Front
Cast on 27 sts
Moss stitch for 10 rows
Change to st st, keeping 6 sts in moss stitch at end of all rows. (This creates self band.)
St st until piece measures 6"
Dec 1 st at beg of next and foll alt row*
Work 5 rows even
Inc 1 st at beg of next and foll alt row
Work even until piece measures 13", ending on ws row.
Armhole Shaping
Cast off 3 sts at beg of next row
Cast off 2 sts at beg of foll rs row
Dec 1 st at beg of each rs row, 2 times
Work even on 20 sts until armhole measures 7", ending with ws row
Neck Shaping
Slip 6 edge sts onto stitch holder
Join new yarn, and work to end of row
At beg of next ws row, cast off 5 sts
Cast off 1 st at beg of next rs row (neck edge), 2 times
Then dec 1 st at neck edge every rs row, 3 times
Cont even on 4 sts until piece measures same as back, ending with ws row.
Shoulder Shaping
Cast off 4 sts.

Right Front
Cast on 27 sts
Moss stitch for 10 rows
Change to st st, keeping 6 sts in moss stitch at beginning of all rows. (This creates self band.)
St st until piece measures 6"
Dec 1 st at end of next and foll alt row*
Work 5 rows even
Inc 1 st at end of next and foll alt row
Work even until piece measures 13", ending on rs row.
Armhole Shaping
Cast off 3 sts at beg of next row
Cast off 2 sts at beg of foll ws row
Dec 1 st at beg of each ws row, 2 times
Work even on 20 sts until armhole measures 7", ending on rs row
Neck Shaping
Work to last 6 sts.
Slip 6 edge sts on to stitch holder.
At beg of next rs row, cast off 5 sts
Cast off 1 st at beg of next ws row (neck edge), 2 times
Then dec 1 st at neck edge every ws row, 3 times
Cont even on 4 sts until piece measures same as back, ending with ws row.
Shoulder Shaping
Cast off 4 sts.

Neck Band
Sew fronts to back at shoulder seams
Mark centre back
Work on 6 sts of each front band in moss stitch until they are long enough to meet at centre back
Cast off and sew bands together at centre back, or graft bands together
Sew bands to fronts and back neck.

Sleeves
Cast on 28 sts
Moss stitch for 10 rows
Change to st st
Inc 1 st at each end of every 6 rows, 9 times
Work even on 46 sts until piece measures 16" (or desired length to armhole)
Shape Cap
Cast off 3 sts at beg of next 2 rows
Cast off 2 sts at beg of next 2 rows
Dec 1 st at each end of every rs row, 2 times (32 sts)
Dec 1 st at each end every 4 rows
Dec 1 st at each end of every rs row, 6 times
Cast off 4 sts at beg of next 2 rows
Cast off rem 10 sts

Finishing
Block all pieces, if necessary
Sew fronts to back at side seams
Sew sleeve seams
Set sleeves into armholes
Insert zip at centre front.

Notes
*If you do not require waist shaping, simply leave these rows out, and work even until piece measures 13".

As you knit the fronts, you may find that the moss stitch pulls the work upwards. you can gently stretch the bands out as you go, or you can leave it, and even things out when you block.

When you knit the bands, you may find that you need to knit them longer than you think, in order to stretch them around the curves of the crew neck.

Looking for cake buttons...

Dear Internet,

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

...is to find me a set of ceramic buttons, in the shape of little cakes.

Pink, for preference.



I'm very bored of knitting my Cathay Shrug, so I've decided to unravel it, and to knit something else instead. There's a lovely pattern in the Winter 2007/08 issue of Vogue Knitting.

As I'm going to be knitting it in a pale pink colour, clearly it needs a set of amazing buttons. I plan to wear the cardigan with a brown dress which has cakes on it (once I've made the dress), so obviously the buttons need to be cake-shaped.

I've found some on Etsy and some on Ebay, but as the cardigan's going to be knitted in a cotton/viscose/silk blend, it would be nicer to have ceramic buttons than plastic ones.

Veronika Buttons are absolutely beautiful, but ever so slightly outside my budget. If I can't find any pretty cakes though, I might just have to stretch to these...

...but if anybody knows where I can buy cake-shaped buttons, I'd love to see them!

Cardigan with Cabled Points - the left front.

My newest issue of Simply Knitting magazine has arrived!

The free gift this month is a pattern counting device, which is perfectly timed, as I keep losing track of my cables.

I spent much of yesterday afternoon knitting, and swearing. I don't know what it is about this particular cardigan, but swearing seems to have accompanied its entire construction so far.

(The back and sleeves are complete, and I'm working on the left front.)

First I was annoyed that the edge cable and the point cables don't twist on the same rows.

Then I was annoyed that my tension changed when the cabled points stopped, and now my edge cables are getting smaller and smaller! Either that or I've lost count, and am cabling on the wrong rows.

Either way, this cardigan is very annoying.

(Why would all the cables not twist on the same row? Why?!)

Looking at the photograph, you can see very clearly that it's definitely my tension that's mucking up the edge cabling. You can see that the knitting between the two short cables is much looser than the knitting immediately above them.

Do I unravel an afternoon's work and start again, or can I live with wonky cables that might even themselves out in the wash? I'm feeling quite inclined to live with it at the moment.

Speaking of cables, for weeks I walked past this jumper in my local Marks & Spencer.



Every time I saw it I thought, "I could knit one of those".

If I'm not heartily sick of cables when I'm finished with this cardigan, I might give it a go. The one change I would make is to mirror the cables on either side of the central section. It annoys me (another thing!) about the Nicky Epstein cardigan that all the cables face the same way, so I don't really want to knit a second annoying cabled garment!

I did learn something extremely useful while I was knitting this cardigan. I learned that if you expect all the cables to be twisting on the same row, and don't read the pattern properly, and then discover that you should have cabled the front band two rows ago... it is perfectly possible to carefully drop the six stitches you're working on for those two rows, twist them round to make the cable, and then pick those two rows back up again.

This is not something I'd like to make a habit of doing, but I'm pleased to find out that it works!

New patterns, and Kool Aid!

Hooray, my new patterns have arrived from America!

They're by Indygo Junction, and I'm really pleased with them.

I've ordered a jacket, a tunic, trousers and skirts. Pretty soon I should have a whole new wardrobe!

The first thing I want to make is the jacket. I have ten metres of heavy black and white toile du juoy fabric that's been sitting around in the Shed for years, and I think it will make a really nice coat. I also have lots of pink pvc with white polka dots, which should lend itself to a really nice raincoat version. I might make a matching hat.

The other pattern which arrived recently from America was a discontinued Simplicity one. The seller included a free gift with the pattern - a little packet of Kool Aid! It is a really little packet - it's an individual serving of almost eight grams. I have absolutely no intention of drinking this stuff, but I am wondering just how much wool I could dye with it...

Knitty has instructions, as does a recent issue of Simply Knitting magazine, although the packets of Kool Aid in the photographs look at least twice the size of mine. I'm sure there's an old saucepan at the back of the cupboard that I can sacrifice as a dye bath, so I think I'll pick up a ball of wool and give it a go!

Two Sleeves in Two Days

Now that my Dad has opened his Christmas present (my parents are going away this year), I can safely reveal that it has taken three weeks to knit a single glove for him. It was ribbed, it was fiddly, and it was in DK, which is the thinnest yarn I have ever used.

Now that I don't need to have the second glove finished until he comes back from his travels (oops...), I decided to give my fingers a bit of a break, and go back to the Nicky Epstein Cardigan with Cabled Points. I knew that knitting with chunky wool on 7½mm needles would be much faster than ribbing in DK, but I wasn't expecting to complete both of the sleeves in just two days!

I'd completely lost track of where I was up to on the first sleeve, so I decided to bite the bullet, unravel what I'd done, and start again. I'm really not having very much luck with this pattern.

This time the mistake genuinely wasn't mine, but a printing error. The row numbers for the sleeve had been printed wrongly, and before I knew it I had three fewer stitches than I needed. I made an executive decision not to undo the sleeve again, but instead to make some cunningly disguised increases on the next row. Thankfully, this worked really well.

I also made an executive decision to change the increases on the sleeves. As you may have noticed on my previous encounter with this cardigan, my maths really isn't up to much, and I couldn't cope with cabling on every sixth row and increasing on every eighth. My decision was to make the increases on the same rows as the cables, which made for less counting, which is fine by me!

As it happened, by the time I'd finished the correct number of increases the sleeve was already at the exact length I was supposed to keep knitting to, so if I'd been increasing every eight rows instead of every six, it would actually have been several inches too long!

If you click through to the larger picture of the single sleeve, you can get a much better indication of how this will look once it's finished. You can really see the bright flecks of blue, and the occasional spot of red, scattered across the sleeve.

Knitters Without Borders

As you may have gathered from the lovely picture below, I have now added a number of knitted items to my web store.

20% of the price of each of the knitted items will be donated to Tricoteurs Sans Frontiers, or Knitters Without Borders.

It's organised by Yarn Harlot, and as I'm currently knitting my fourth scarf from one of her free patterns it seemed only fair to try and give something back. All monies raised go to Medecins Sans Frontiers.


If anybody does want to buy anything, maybe as a last-minute gift, the last UK posting date before Christmas is Thursday.

A scarf and a squirrel handbag.

Remember that frighteningly tangled skein of silk?

This is what became of it:

It's a narrow scarf, which is long enough to reach below the waist on both sides. It's knitted with one strand of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk and two strands of Colinette Parisienne held together. I cast on 13 stitches, on 5mm needles. Every fourth row, I changed to a 10mm needle. Otherwise it's just plain garter stitch - keep knitting until the yarn runs out!



Here's the last of the pre-ordered tote bags, which I finished today.



You may have noticed that it's a different shape from the others!

The photographs don't show the shape particularly well - it's more curvy than it looks. It's big, too - in the second picture the bag has an A4 pad inside it, to keep it nice and flat. It has one long handle, and you can just see a tiny sneaky peek of the Design By Claire label in there too.



Tomorrow night is Hallowe'en and I've just rustled up a very quick costume thanks to Martha Stewart. I'll tell you all about it as soon as I have some photos. Happy Hallowe'en!

Links and recommendations

On Tuesday I had a little frenzy of ordering things.

The first item to arrive dropped through my letterbox yesterday, which was nice and fast!
I'd placed an order with Woven Labels UK for some new labels to sew inside my creations.

I ordered 144 labels, for which I paid a grand total of £5.90, plus 99p postage and packing. Bargain!

I did cheat a little bit - because I didn't want an image or a special font, or my own logo woven onto tape, I actually ordered the school name tapes. Red text on a white background matches my website perfectly, and they look really nice. They do have a really nice selection of fancy labels though, so you could still choose something a bit more dramatic without going the whole hog and paying for your own logo to be done.

This is the second time I've used Woven Labels UK, and I would heartily recommend them.

The other items I ordered might take a little longer - one is fabric from America (more printed cottons from Cia's Palette), and the other is Fair Trade organic cotton from India.



For those of you who are knitters, I am very excited to have been signed up to Ravelry! I haven't added very many details yet, but I have just uploaded lots and lots of photos of knitting to Flickr.

I've also just bought 10 skeins of Colinette Banyan in Neptune. It was a bargain on Ebay, and with all of those lovely patterns on Ravelry, I'm afraid I couldn't resist...

Some days, you just shouldn't knit.

I was off work yesterday, with tonsilitis, so I thought I'd have a nice relaxing afternoon on the sofa, gently coughing into a bit of nice simple knitting.

I had a skein of Colinette Parisienne mohair and a skein of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk, which I thought would pair up nicely together to make a fabulously soft scarf.

I wound them into balls with my trusty ball winder, and made a start.



I had wondered whether the mohair might be a bit of a pain, as I'm using two strands held together with one strand of the silk, and I was a bit worried that I might get into a tangle using the yarn from both the inside and the outside of the ball at once.

Three rows later, and I discover that the problem is not going to be with the mohair, but with the silk.



My carefully wound ball has started to fall apart at both ends!

An hour of careful untangling later, and I am faced with this:



That could have gone better. :(


The LiveJournal brit_knits community have been extremely helpful, and in the end I was able to untangle the whole thing, without taking the scissors to it! It only took five and three-quarter hours... I could have knitted the whole scarf in that time!

Speaking of which... I'm about twenty rows in, and I've now decided that the scarf is too wide. I'm really not sure yet whether I can face unravelling the knitting as well as the yarn, so I might just have to learn to live with a short, wide scarf!


Lesson Of The Day: Don't wind silk into centre-pull balls!

Knitting dress for the Knitting show...

Way back in the mists of... July, I showed you the making-of Rosealare's dress.

The pattern is Butterick B5028, and the fabric is a cotton tana lawn, from Liberty, with the most adorable knitting print.

We've been plagued by postal strikes throughout the making of this dress. The mock-up went back and forth between us a couple of times, very slowly, and there's another postal strike from now until the day that Rosealare needs to wear the dress. It's going by Special Delivery in the morning, which would normally arrive the next day, but we'll just have to keep our fingers crossed that the parcel arrives in time.

The occasion to which Rosealare is going to wear the dress is the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace!

What better place to wear a knitting dress, than to a knitting show?

Knitting Synchronicity

Every now and then I go through my giant stack of magazines, cut out the bits which interest me, and chuck the remains in the recycling.

Over the weekend, I found a picture of a jumper that I really liked, and idly wondered whether I could be bothered to work out a pattern to knit one for myself.

Today, I arrived home from work to find the Fall issue of Knit1 magazine sitting on my doorstep. (Thanks to Magazine Café, where you can subscribe to American magazines in the UK.) What should I see amongst the patterns? A jumper which looks remarkably similar to the one I'd snipped out of Elle!

On the left: Elle UK, August 2007. Jumper by Louis Vuitton.
On the right: Knit1 Magazine, Fall 2007.

Perfect.

I'll probably never get around to actually knitting this pattern. On the list of things I really want to knit for myself, this one's pretty low. But just knowing that I can knit it, if I want to, is making me very happy this evening.

It seems I owe Nicky Epstein an apology.

In the greatest tradition of these things, it's not her, it's me.

I did say that I was mathematically challenged, when I was complaining about this cardigan pattern being all wrong. As it turns out, I am also challenged in the department of being able to read a knitting pattern. Oops.

What I was trying to do was:
k12 sl1 k1 psso k1 k2tog, k12 sl1 k1 psso k1 k2tog, k12 sl1 k1 psso k1 k2tog...

and what I should I have been doing was this:

k12 sl1 k1 psso k1 k2tog k12, k12 sl1 k1 psso k1 k2tog k12, k12 sl1 k1 psso k1 k2tog k12...

Spot the extra "k12" in the second line, which makes all the difference.


Anyway, I have now finished the back, and aside from my own stupidity, it was extremely easy to knit.

The waist shaping at the back is achieved entirely by the cables pulling the knitting in - there's no shaping in the back at all, apart from the armholes.

The last photo is probably the most accurate in terms of the colour. The wool is Rowanspun Chunky, which I bought in the sale at Cucumberpatch

The only change I've made so far is that I'm knitting it on 7.5mm needles instead of 8mm. The smallest size given in the pattern was 38" and I wanted mine to be a little tighter than that, so hopefully the slightly smaller gauge will make just enough difference.

(You watch the damn thing turn out too small now!)

Nicky Epstein's Cardigan with Cabled Points

Has anybody ever successfully knit Nicky Epstein's Cardigan with Cabled Points?

The pattern is in a supplement with this month's Knitting magazine (UK). I find it suspicious that I've just trawled through fifty-four pages of Google images and the whole of Flickr, and I can't find a single photograph of the finished garment. (I'd try Ravelry, but I'm still 31,783rd in the queue to join!)

I'm asking because I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon unravelling the damn thing. I am amazed at how utterly wrong a pattern can be, and still make it through to publication!

I was making the smallest size, for which the instructions are:

Cast on 116.
Row 1: K12, skp, k1, k2tog, k12 - rep to end.

Except that first row only adds up to 114 stitches.

I decided to persevere, pulling the two extra stitches off the needle, carefully unpicking the slip knot and unravelling them, in order not to have to unravel the entire thing straight away.

Row 2: p. Not much that can go wrong there.

Row 3: k11, skp, k1, k2tog, k11 - rep to end.

Uh-oh. These decreases don't line up neatly with the ones below. (Which is what we want if we're making points.) I persevere, and reach the end of my last k11 with a mere seven stitches left over.

This is not going well.

I break out the calculator.

Anyone who knows me will be aware that my maths skills are pretty much non-existent, so there may have been a certain amount of swearing involved at this point. I carefully work out the new repeats, unravel the whole thing, and start again with 114 stitches. Unfortunately my carefully worked out maths is completely wrong, and I have to unravel the first three rows and start again for the third time.

Third time lucky - I put in lots and lots of stitch markers where I want the decreases for the points to be. It's like knitting a porcupine, but at least I now have clues as to what I'm supposed to be doing. I decrease away happily.

Unfortunately, by row 9 I already have fewer stitches than I'm supposed to have at the end of row 13, and my points aren't coming out the right shape (according to the picture) at all. I've checked the internet for corrections, and all I can find is something relating to the numbering of rows on the sleeves. Nothing at all which mentions the maths for the points is all wrong.

It's at this point that I give up, unravel the entire thing again, and start knitting a nice simple cardigan from Simply Knitting March 2007. I'm adding some shaping to the back to make it a bit less like a giant rectangle with two cables down the front, but so far it's knitting up beautifully and I can't fault the pattern at all.



I'd be quite interested to know whether anybody at Knitting actually had to knit the cardigan that's shown in the picture, or whether it was a stock photo from one of Nicky Epstein's books. Either way, I'd be interested to know how a pattern which is so completely wrong can make it through to publication without anybody apparently having knitted it! The mistakes are obvious by the second row, so you'd be aware of the problem straight away.



If anybody does actually have a list of errata for this pattern, I'd really like to see it. I really want to knit it, as it's a beautiful cardigan, but I'm damned if I can figure out how to fix the pattern by myself!