Purple!

Or at least purple in real life!


Gosh, but I'm slouchy!

I'm wearing my Cobblestone-ish sweater today. In addition to the modifications I planned to make (adding waist shaping and shortening the body), there are a few I didn't exactly plan (but which I've decided aren't a big deal). I knew I wanted to make the yoke shallower than in the original, but--thinking of the shaping on a bottom-up raglan--I decided that to do that, I should start the yoke shaping with fewer stitches.

So I decided to increase fewer stitches than I decreased when I did the waist shaping, making the sweater 8 stitches smaller at the underarm than at the lower hem. This fits just fine (maybe slightly better than it would have if I'd increased more, since I'm more of a pear than an even hourglass), but my thinking was wrong--since the decreases in this yoke are concentrated in just a few rows, the number of stitches at the beginning of the yoke has less effect on the depth of the yoke than it would in a raglan. Fortunately, I realized that as I started the yoke, so instead I shortened the yoke by working my decrease rows close together, with fewer even rows between them.

However, my original plan meant that I had fewer stitches in the body and the sleeves at the start of the yoke than the pattern specified, so my stitch counts were always a few stitches off through the yoke. Since it's just garter stitch, that didn't affect the stitch pattern, and I made sure to center the short rows so my neck shaping is symmetrical.

Anyway. That was a lot of explanation for invisible differences! No one can tell that there are 198 stitches in my yoke instead of 204, or whatever the numbers were. I really enjoyed the pattern--nicely brainless, but with enough shaping (once I added waist shaping) that there were milestones to work towards. I sped through it, and I think it turned into exactly what I wanted--a basic sweater I can throw on with lots of things. I'd hoped that my hourglass sweater (from Last Minute Knitted Gifts, pre-blog but I'm sure you've seen other people's) would fill this role, but it turns out that the cuffs behave weirdly under a winter coat, and the wider neckline doesn't play nice with most of my shirts.

And here's the yarn from the Woolgirl Sock Club shipment for the month, which also included mint-chocolate lip balm, a coordinating stitch marker, notebook, and pen.


Miss Babs' Waterfall

It's occurred to me that since there's a blog for this club, I really should try to knit the socks kind of on schedule, at least if I'm going to do the club pattern. (No, I don't know why I join socks clubs without planning to knit the club patterns, or follow the club "schedule" either. My best guess is that I want the yarn, but I know I'll talk myself out of buying individual skeins, on the grounds that I have plenty of yarn and plenty of socks. The mystery is why I don't talk myself out of joining sock clubs, since there's more yarn leading to more socks.)

Moving on... I'm saving the Hanami shawl for travel knitting, while I'm visiting my family next week and then in Peru (not to worry, I'm also going to bring simple socks). But I did start another fish for Schaefer Yarns, and am working on a sweater for them too.