April 15, 2018

Cast on with 3.5mm needles after all. My swatch on 4.5mm needles came out way too big, and I think my 4mm swatch was big too before I completely lost track of the chart and gave up on it. Hopefully the 14” inch positive ease I’m working towards gives me enough room for error to work on the smaller needles. I’ve learnt I need to be careful following the pattern from my swatch experience if anything, so I’m separating my pattern repeats with stitch markers - not something I often do but the whole pattern is a little out of my comfort zone. Getting used to working with this yarn at least.

April 22, 2018

Progressed just about up to the 5th pattern repeat. Had a few issues with mistakes so far but thanks to the stitch markers spaced around the round I’m spotting them quickly, and mostly they’re missed YOs from two rounds down which have been straightforward to pull up.

I used a Russian join to attach a new ball of yarn and it really worked well for this chain structured yarn.

April 29, 2018

I’ve got past the split for the arms… which means purl on WS for a while unfortunately.

May 7, 2018

Finished off the body today. I was a little confused by the neck instructions, I interpreted the pattern as saying I should move the last of the bound off shoulder stitches onto the needles with the neck stitches but this gave me 2 more stitches in the neck round? Or if I bound off an extra pair of stitches with 3 needle bind off that gives 2 less. It didn’t matter too much in the end though.

I did undo and redo the neck BO twice to get a loose enough neckline, eventually being happy when I used a 5mm tip on the RH of my interchangeables.

The lace looks much nicer after steam blocking, and it’s grown out to be closer to planned size. Now halfway through the first sleeve.

May 13, 2018

All done :)

From starting out struggling to see how I would cope with the chain-structured yarn snagging and not being able to keep track of the chart I’ve come on a long way. It became a really enjoyable knit by the end the simple boxy structure complements the drapy fabric well. I’m such a fan of the boat neck too it looks really elegant.