Sunday, June 26, 2011

Knitting updates and lessons learned

First the lace project.  As you can see I have made a little progress.


This now represents about 100 rows of knitting. However, most of them were frogged. Thankfully, I started using life lines or there would be even fewer remaining representatives.  

LESSON LEARNED: This lace has one row of pattern (the even numbered rows) , then one row of all purl stitches (odd numbered rows). I was putting the life line in every 4th row: 4, 8, 12, and 16 but with all of the  jigs and jogs created by the various stitches, when I had to follow a life line back, I had a real problem getting all of the stitches back on my needle. So then I had the idea of putting the life line through the purl stitches. This works much better! Now I put the life lines through rows 1, 5, 9, and 13.

My bamboo sweater is about half done -- the easy half! The back is complete. It only took about 3 hours to knit on my Bond USM. 

The Bamboozle yarn is soft and smooth and I imagine that it will be very comfortable to wear. But it had some issues with knitting on the machine. I had a hard time getting an e-wrap closed hem on it because as I wrapped the yarn around the needles, it took the twist out of it and the 8 ply yarn split up. I modified my method and used waste yarn at the bottom of the sweater. When I was done with the entire sweater back, I rehung the bottom of the sweater and back stitched an edge before removing the weighted hem and waste yarn. I think that it turned out pretty good for an "on-the-fly" change.

Since I am estimating that the cable may add as much as 2 extra hours of time to the front of the sweater, I am going to wait until next weekend to knit the front. I know that I won't have time to do the front of the sweater in one sitting and I don't want to leave it (pardon the pun) "hanging" for a week. I know that I could leave it by taking the weight off of it, but since my Bond is on the dining room table, I would be afraid that it would get bumped or knocked and will fall off of the needles.

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