Productive Knitting Week: Part 1 - The Carnaby

I finally finished the skirt that I have been working on for about the last month. Last night I completed the stabilizing crochet stitches at the waist; this morning I wove in and skimmed in the ends of the yarn joins; and then I started the blocking process.

I have posted my blocking process in a prior post, so I won't go into it again, however, I want to show you that years ago I bought a really big bowl to put chips in for parties. It is bigger than a punch bowl and it turned out to be one of the best knitting tools I ever purchased! Here is the skirt enduring it's 30 minute soak.

Another purchase that I made a few months ago were blocking wires. Turned out that they work for a lot of things. In the set that I purchased are two flexible wires. I used both of them to weave into the waist of the skirt. This gave me the ability to set the curve into the top of the skirt and pull the panels out to a length of 20.5 inches which should make the skirt long enough to wear to work. You can just see the wire at the top of the picture on the right.

I left the skirt pinned to my blocking mat (aka my spare bed's mattress) with a small circular fan blowing across the top of it. Now, it was time for a field trip to my local Hobby Lobby for buttons.

I would have preferred a darker wood, but because I had extended the length of the skirt by 8 stitches, I needed to put in a 7th button. There were buttons that were more of a red cherry wood color, but there were only 6 of those buttons left. Hmm. I think these lighter maple wood looking ones look pretty good anyway. I will be sewing these on tomorrow and with any luck will be wearing it to work on Monday.

Stay tuned for parts two and three!

Happy Knitting.