I haven’t updated in a long while because I’ve been on holiday. I’m back now to bring you all up to speed on some of the things I’ve done over the summer. I got my copy of Jane Waller & Susan Crawford’s A Stitch In Time, and am still in love with it three months later.
To combat boredom while sitting around doing nothing I decided to try out one of the patterns called It Cannot Fail to Please.
copyright © arbour house publishing
Some quick specs for anyone interested. I used a single set of 2.0mm straight needles, rather than one set of 2.25mm and one set of 3.25 because when I tried those it was far too large. And I used seven skeins of Melanie Wolle Sport & Strumpfwolle Klassik in a green colour.
This project has been a see-saw of hellish proportions since I started on the 24th of July. I was almost finished with the back a few days after starting, but as usual I was too lazy to make a test swatch of the pattern, the English word for which I can’t remember at the moment. Once I was a two thirds of the way in I realised that my knitting was already twice the size of the final dimensions of the largest size. I undid everything.
I started again, and this time did make a test swatch of the pattern on 2.0mm needles that was still too big, but only by a small amount. My mum, a knitting goddess, then looked over the pattern for me, and said there was no way that the medium size was going to be big enough, and that I should be knitting a large. So when I cast on again, I knitted the large size. She later asked me why I was knitting the large size, when the medium looked more my size. So now I have a huge jumper.
Pattern swatch
There are a reasonable number of mistakes in the modern pattern, but most of them are so obvious that I caught then right away, and they were correct on the original pattern, so it really isn’t a big deal. Outside of the sleeves which I think are fine if you’re knitting the original, smallest, size, but at least for the large size didn’t always make sense. Again, it was fairly easy once I got the hang of the pattern to fix up the mistakes.
Because of the lace pattern, I want to make sure to block this before I make it up. This means I’ll have to wait until I get my pins out of storage on the 8th of September before I can put it together. I’ll update on this project again once it’s finished, unless something huge happens.
Until then, here are some photos of the finished pieces waiting to be blocked. I never trust that blocking will make the pattern look like it should, even though logically I know it will, I’m still afraid that it will look like it does now when I’m finished. Rather than the leaves.
Sleeve
Front
There is a fun stitch I hadn’t seen before used in this pattern: purl twice into a stitch. It involves first purling into the front, but leaving the stitch on the left needle, then purling into the back of the same stitch, then completing the stitch.
