I started swatching for my mother's cardigan this week. I started with a sleeve , because I need to get used to doing stranded colourwork. I'm making a mix between Kaffe Fassett's Zig Zag cardigan and Elizabeth Zimmermann's Ski Sweater with Colour Patterns. There are a number of things about this project that are starting to worry me. First of all, it's an epic project. A full jumper of colourwork and, compared with all the other knitting techniques I'm inexperienced in this one. Secondly, the pattern has some eight stitch floats, and I was under the impression that colourwork should never have longer than five stitch floats. I thought I was leaving really long floats, but they are not long enough - it's funny but Elizabeth Zimmermann said this would happen! Still it feel good to rise to a challenge, particularly since, when I went to put this on Ravelry I discovered it's my three hundredth project.
As mentioned, prior to our hiking trip I suddenly, and rather randomly, decided to knit Andrea Morwy's Traveler Shell . It's basically an open fronted rectangle in a knit purl pattern. The pattern is FOURTEEN pages long. Why is the pattern 14 pages long? Because, instead of explaining the ten row repeat and then putting the shaping on top of that (e.g. decrease while continuing to knit in pattern), she writes out the entire ten row knit purl sequence every time something changes. Additionally, most of the time she starts with even number being the right side and wrong numbers being the right side,which is just plain odd. It's confusing and it's like she wants to keep you looking at the pattern for every row, rathe than following the very intuitive stitch pattern, which I had memorised after one repeat. The instructions for the band just say 'pick up x number of stitches'. No ratios, no acjnowledgement that different bits of the band have different ratios. Afte...
It looks amazing already!
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