Skip to main content

An unintentional BFF jumper

When we were in China Leon and I stumbled across a yarn shop around the corner from the Forbidden City. The guy working there didn't speak any English, but, when I picked up this lovely dark grey wool he indicated it was sheep, by making horns with his fingers and and baaing! I bought 750 grams of wool in dark grey.

It looks like an eight ply. I'm pretty sure it's pure wool, because it felts, which is good, because I will be doing felted joins. I bought it in 2 big skeins, but when it came time to ball it up I discovered that within the skeins the yarn was divided into 50 gram lots, so I have 15 little balls of wool.

I was originally going to make a Jo Sharp cabled jumper for Leon, but I discovered the smallest size would give him 9 inches of positive ease. Also, it was knit in pieces, which really isn't as nice as seamless, and he thought the cables were too chunky. So I headed back to the inimitable Elizabeth Zimmerman. I decided to make a cabled seamless raglan. I'm hoping that I've done the maths right and the shoulder decreases will line up nicely. Only time and knitting will tell.

I designed (or thought I had designed) a cable and rib pattern that is, I think, pleasing to the eye. I was knitting happily away on it at knit night, when I looked over at Nicola's BFF sock. I looked back at the jumper sleeve I was working on. I realised they have a lot in common. I have unintentionally used the cable and rib pattern from Cookie A's BFF sock pattern. Still, it means if I have any yarn left over I can make him a pair of matching socks.




In other fibre related news yesterday I took a very long lunch break and went by the Spinners and Weavers guild shop. I bought some green dye, some more of the red silk so I can actually finish my red wool and some bright green silk thread, which I am going to experiment with plying with some army green I have. But first I am going to actually spin that beautiful Corriedale I have prepped from fleece. I'm not sure if I keep putting it off because 800 grams of three ply double knit weight is an intimidating amount of spinning or because I want to be spinning the pretty shiny colours.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unravelled wednesday and WAYRN - the one where I prepare

We are heading off for some camping and hiking and general R&R on Friday, so I'm currently in planning and preparing mode. Of course that mainly means deciding what to knit - I'm going to make the Old Romance cardigan by Joji Locatelli. The yarn is wound and I'm ready to go. I completed Leon's Winter Set (2023) just in time, and it's currently blocking. I'm reading Georgette Hayer's Fredrica , which I am enjoying very much. Regency romance is so sweet and, unlike current romance offerings, I know it won't suddenly tumble into gynaecological territory!  For unexplained reasons, NetGalley is offering some Georgette Heyer books at the moment - (maybe it's re-release?) and I'm taking this opportunity to read a few more of them And that's my week in knitting and reading.  To read my all my book reviews, and to see everything I knit, you can find me on Ravelry as  Sharondoublekni t and on GoodReads as  Sharondblk .  I'm joining in with Kat ...
2 comments
Read more

Yarnalong - the one with the final bit of transport

Remember how I took every form of transport known to man a fortnight ago? Well, I was missing just one thing, suburban trains. But today I got to remedy that, knitting my way to Dandenong for work. Yay? My Char jumper has been knitting up ridiculously fast. It's easy, pleasant and a well written pattern. I'm reading Rachael Herron's latest book The Ones Who Matter Most . It's a good read so far, family centered fiction, easy to read but still emotionally challenging. I'm listening to Evelyn Waugh's Men At Arms . I'm enjoying it, I didn't really know what to expect, but some of it reminds me of Catch 22, in that it catalogues the absurdities of war and bureaucracy. The narrator has the perfect upper crust English accent and I'm very pleased it's the first of a trilogy.   And that's another week of reading, knitting and catching trains everywhere for me. Do pop along to Ginny's blog to see what she and the rest of the yarnalong ...
3 comments
Read more

Why Andrea Mowry, why? (A rant and a rather nice finished object)

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...
1 comment
Read more