have started swatching, but am waiting for Tangled Yarns to stock the pattern before I start :)

Which lace pattern shows the real colour!? WHO KNOWS!?

anyway. 14/10/09

I have finished swatching, and I am fine stitch wise - over the two pattern repeats and lace columns, I get 6 inches - or near enough. Row gauge, on the other hand, one honeybee is only 1inch, not 1.5. Nevermind, not to worry.

Also, I caved, seeing TY isn’t getting pattern until around 22nd. Although I did cave before I knew that. I’m just using that to justify my decision! lol.

16/10/09
Started the ribbing yesterday on the train into work. Have added a second ball to alternate skeins. Hoping it doesn’t turn out stripy…

26/10/09
Thankfully, alternating skeins is not giving any stripy-ness. There are three skeins - light, medium and dark. So going through and alternating all three is painful. I’m getting there though. I have done just over 8 inches (which is 10 repeats) - only 7 more inches to go! Hrm… or maybe I’ll go to 20 repeats!

The first four rows of the lace pattern is awesome. Rows five and six? Bah, painful. They take almost as long as the first four.

27/12/2009 - Time for an update - working on the sleeves - have finished one, and working on second. Loving my 30cm addi circulars - I’ll be building up my needle stash with these for sure. Still have another project which takes preference at the moment though.

02/02/2010

Finished! My goodness…

I really enjoyed this. I learnt some new things (the sleeve construction was the biggest new thing I learnt!)

I still don’t now if I’m happy with the colour. The photos of me wearing the garment makes it look quite orange based, which is how it looks when it’s in a yellowed based light environment. I like it when it has it’s dark purple base, when it is in a white light based environment. We’ll see how we go.

The buttons are picked from Grans’s button stash. There are a lot of buttons in there that I love, but there were only one or two of them. So I was impressed that I found six of them that suited the garment. They were measured 2” apart… but when I blocked it, they measure more like 3” apart. I don’t think I’ll wear it fully buttoned though.

Blocking - wow, it grew immensely. It measured just on 12” from bottom of garment to under the arm before I blocked it, and now it measures 16”. Same with the arms - they were just below my elbow before blocking, afterwards they are just hitting my wrists. So I’m glad I didn’t knit any further!

I have just under 30g left of yarn. I was beginning to worry that I’d run out (which would leave me in quite a pickle, seeing we don’t have any of this yarn left at the shop - and Archangel has varied so much between dyelots!) but I have plenty to spare.

A lovely knit, the pattern was easily memorised (I had been stopped by a few people on the train asking about the garment, and they were amazed that I was doing it from memory :). When I was doing the cap shaping, I put markers where the stitches I needed to decrease were (as in, decrease until there are x stitches remaining, I put two markers where x were, so I didn’t need to keep track of them).

This is going to be amazingly warm at the shop! I think I see more garments done in Malabrigo sock in my future! (and really, it’s not that expensive. I needed 3 skeins, and that was plenty. And it blocks amazingly, so I didn’t need to knit much ;) (I would have been happy where I’d knitted to, but I’m even happier that the garment is longer!)