are kind of addicting.
I tackled Mermaid last fall on the Black Sea Cruise. Solo was up next (if you want to look at her whole line – go here). None of them are all that complicated or difficult, even allowing for knitting forever on size 3.00 mm needles. Garter stitch does get boring. But as one woman mentioned in a Ravelry Forum – “You don’t have to worry about running out of knitting while on your trip.”
I started Blues while in Egypt this past Dec, but lost interst in it after I returned home. Some how a summer vest just did not hold a lot of fascination while the inside temperatures were holding just a few degrees above freezing.
Pyramid
Is constructed by knitting from the outside in. Front and back as separate pieces are joined at the shoulders. I have to tack down the neck placket, then knit some i-cord around the neck for a finish.
shoulders sewn together
Stitches are then picked up along the sides and the sleeves are knit down in pattern
the first sleeve
leaving the whole thing looking like this at the present.
body + start of first sleeve
It doesn’t take that much concentration, but it does take some so that I remember to do the decrease at the far end of the row.
The good thing about this kind of construction is that the rows are longest at the beginning and it does get better.
Pagoda
Which leads me to Pagoda. I bought the kit in Demark, so that must have made it back when Ms Soprano was a toddler. It could have been as late as 1999, but I rather doubt that. In any case, the kit was well aged. So well aged, as it turned out, that the wool was a casualty in the 2003-2004 m*th invasion.
(the one that happened while I was downrange for 15 months and some people in my house didn’t understand some basics about closing up rooms, keeping doors closed and killing off weird flying things. Our house in Germany, like most, does not have screens.
Why am I telling you all of this? Silly me, while I was substituting yarn I looked at the pattern. Danish pattern. I can’t read Danish. But I can look at pictures and I can count rows when looking at other peoples pictures on Ravelry. First off, I finally realized that I don’t have to worry about the sleeve decreases for a while. The second was that I really didn’t have to knit this thing in three pieces and sew them together. Since I was already doing a yarn substitution, I could knit the most of it in one piece. Off I go with hardly a thought. Left front, back, right front. It works until half way up the garment at which point the fronts are finished and I only have the upper portion of the back. Knit from the outside in.
9xx is a freaking lot of stitches on a needle. It takes a long time to knit a row. Listening to audiobooks is the only way to maintain sanity. (who am I kidding, this jacket is thousands of stitches, each and every flipping one of them a knit stitch. garter.)
this is only 8 rows with dozens to go....
Media
finished the new Nora Roberts, couple of hours to go on Callahan’s Key. Now – I can go on to Lois McMaster Bujold (more SciFi) or I can switch over to Simon Winchester and listen to Krakotoa.
OH! If you have not listened to The Takeover (Mur Lafferty) – go directly here at Podiobooks to get it. Unless of course you don’t like fun lyrics, have never dealt with office politics, or had the suspicion that some of the people with whom you work are a bit different.
