Summer review

Whenever I haven’t blogged for awhile it gets overwhelming on where to start at so I decided to do a summer knitting wrap up since fall is here. I did a lot of spinning this summer so I’m very pleased with that but my knitting…, well it didn’t live up to my expectations.

I thought I had finished the sideways vest but after blocking it I noticed that one side was longer than the other. I kept thinking how could this be? It was all even before blocking. With further investigation I found the problem. This vest is knitted by casting on stitches for the front side and binding off for the other front side. I hope that makes since. Anyway my binding off stitches are much tighter then my casting on stitches. Arrr, I’m not sure what to do with it. My sister suggested to try doing the bind off with a bigger needle. I had already tied the ends in so taking the bind off stitches out was a bear but I did get them out. I think I need to do a swatch and play with the bind off which I haven’t felt like playing with so it has been abandoned. It is still sitting there waiting for the final bind off. Does anybody have any experience with how to keep the bind off stitches loose? If I use a bigger needle should I go up one or two needle sizes?


Then there is the Ugly sweater. I got the bottom part of it done and tried it on and it turned out a bit snug on me. This is the back view. I didn’t want to give you guys the Buddha belly shot ;).It’s my fault I was thinking the cotton yarn would bag out and not snap back so I knitted it to be slightly smaller. My first reaction was to see if Dax would take it but she wasn’t that interested in it so it has been abandoned to for the time being. It's a good chance this one will be heading to the frog pound. Well unless I can lose say 20lbs or so :), yeah probably the frog pound.

So after these disappointments, which are leaving ufo’s all over the house, I decided to not deal with any of them and cast on a new project. I’m working on a free pattern from Vogue’s Knitting magazine called silver belle.

There you have it, it’s been a summer of UFO’s. Let's hope the fall will be a little more productive.

Have a great week.

The Ugly Sweater

It’s not actually ugly, it just got nicknamed that over time. Back in March of 07 my sister and I wanted to knit the same sweater pattern and we choose this,Surplice Lace Top.

My sister kept showing it to friends and family members and didn’t get the excited response that she felt it deserved. The responses were something like, "it’s ok," or "are you sure you want to knit that." So she dubbed it the ugly sweater. I of course liked it, so we started looking for yarn to knit it. The yarn suggested for it was not in our budget so we started looking for something that was a little less pricey. We ended up not finding anything. I put the pattern back on the shelf for another day.

I saw on Mcknitter's blog that a somewhat local craft store was going out of business. It’s a little bit of a drive for me to get there, but not bad. So I made a note to make sure to go by the going out of business sale later that week. When we got there everything was at least 40% off. It was crowded. Dax went to the painting section and I went straight to the knitting section and it had already been hit hard. I did see some bernat organic cotton and thought maybe this would work for the ugly sweater. The yarn suggested for the original pattern was also 100% cotton. I had to make a decision, the yarn was quickly disapperaing so I bought it. I know this yarn is usually used for rags. This could be one of my worst ideas in knitting, maybe my surplice lace top is destined to really be the ugly sweater. Throwing all caution to the wind, I casted on.If this doesn’t work out I’m going to have a lot of rag yarn in my stash.

As for the craft store sale I also found some jacquard dyes and Dax got some paint/paint brushes. So it was worth the drive, not to mention we ate lunch at Panera Bread.

I hope everybody has a great weekend.