I’m making good progress on my knitting. I have finished the shoulder areas of the fronts and back and am starting on knitting the body from the armholes downwards. I’ve never knitted anything like this before, but the pattern is easy to follow and if you’ve done a far amount of conventional knitting in the past it’s not really much of a challenge. All the cast ons are using the provisional method so that you have stitches to use later to knit in the opposite direction. I’ve cast on like this once before, but all my knitting instructions are in my new studio and not here with me, so I looked at some videos and written instructions on the web. I followed a combination of both, but one thing I did was not a good idea. One lot of written instructions said to use both needles together for the cast on. Seemed somehow logical to me as you are making two lots of stitches, but in practice it was a bad idea. When I knitted in the opposite direction from the cast on the first row of stitches was far too loose. I ended up using a crochet hook to pull all the excess wool to the side of the work so that the tension looked OK.
So for the next attempt I used one needle one size larger than required for the actual knitting tension. This was much better, but still too loose. The crochet hook came into play again. So in future I will just use the same needle as for the rest of the pattern. Here are a couple of photos showing the shoulder area before I started knitting in the round on the body. The second shows the state of play. The knitting looks a little lumpy in places – that’s because I’m using the wool straight from being unravelled without washing it again to straighten out the kinks. My mum did a lot of recycling of wool too and originally she always unwound the wool into skeins and then washed the skeins and left them to drip dry, which straightened the wool again nicely. I’ve mostly done that too in the past, but in the middle of winter in a small flat I have nowhere to hang the wool to drip dry. So I’m knitting kinks and all and will straighten out the lumps and bumps when the garment is finished by giving it another immersion in water. I’m pretty certain that my mum changed to knitting straight away with the unravelled wool and that I’ve done this before too and that all worked out fine in the end.
I’m enjoying this knitting much more knowing that I won’t have to sew all the pieces together once the knitting is finished. It’s the part I dislike about knitting all the sections of the garment as separate pieces. I’ve not found my ideal way to get a good finish. With this pattern I have nothing to worry about.
P.S. The colour in the photos looks so different because one is taken with flash at night and the other in daylight. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
