Sweater Vest continued

Work has kept me incredibly busy over the last couple of weeks. So busy that I did not get too much knitting in. It took me nearly all month to get the two pieces for the sweater vest done, but I completed the knitting tonight and will now bury all the loose ends and block the sweater. My plan is to get it done by next week so that I can wear it the following week to work.

The texture pattern is really lovely and I am happy with the way that it turned out. I did have some trouble working out the way the neckline was done and I ended up using a graph to figure it out. Math is great!

Happy Knitting!

Animal Tracks - A good yarn: Knitters make sweaters for penguins after oil spill

Life sometimes gets in the way of knitting. I didn't even have time to blog last weekend, but a friend passed this story to me (THANKS SCOTT) and I had to share. This is so cute it should be against the law!

Animal Tracks - A good yarn: Knitters make sweaters for penguins after oil spill:

Sweater Vest

Well, I spent the last week working on a new project. Yes, I know I have not finished the mittens, but I have a good excuse. My friend was not able to try them on so that I can check for proper placement of the texting thumb opening. Or at least that is the story to which I am sticking!

But I love my new project. It is a V-necked sweater vest which I found in Vogue Knitting: Very Easy Knits a "best of" book put out by Butterick Patterns in 1999. My pattern, Textured Vest" is just as the book states -- very easy. The 4 row pattern is easy: Knit row, Purl row, K1 P1 row, Purl row. The texture that is created resembles a waffle.

The pattern shows it in a solid color, but I am mixing it up a little. The main color is a lovely charcoal grey heather the stripes in a dark plum heather. There will be 3 plum colored stripes 2 narrow stripes flanking a wider stripe starting below the arm holes and going above half way up the v-neck. I have chosen a beautiful Classic Wool by Patons a 100% hand wash wool. It knits beautifully. The twist is perfect and it has a nice elastic feel to it when stretched.

Convertible Mitten Update -- Thumbs Down

The convertible mitten project is languishing in a bag as other obligations (work) and passions (MHFV) have taken priority over knitting this week. Thankfully, I do have a long train commute out of the city everyday and was able to get a little bit of work done on the mitten thumb. It was, however, all for naught as I soon found out I made a huge miscalculation on the number of stitches that I needed to leave live for the thumb. By the time I had knitted half way up the thumb, I realized that you could have put 3 thumbs in the opening. Of course it looked ridiculous. So much for "winging it."

It is errors in judgement like this that make me appreciate website forums like Knitting Paradise. I was able to quickly get a suggestion from another knitter on how to correct this problem. I am getting lots of practice picking up stitches with dpns. I picked up a row of knitting as close to the original live stitches as possible and frogged down to that point. I then tinked back to the original live stitches.

My next step was to use the kitchener stitch to close up some of the stitches in the palm.  I have never used the kitchener stitch on any project, so I hit YouTube and watched a video by theknitwitch. The video was easy to follow and the repair job turned out better than I expected. I had a rather difficult time because the stitches were a bit stretched and they didn't smooth out really well. The lesson learned here is to use a waste yarn that is not bigger than the yarn in the project. I will obviously have to do the same thing to the second mitten as it has the exact same problem. At least I was not knitting the mitten thumbs two-at-a-time!

Happy Knitting!