theraineysisters knitting and so much more

Happy Hallowe’en from the other Rainey Sister!  The doorbell just rang — our 4th set of trick or treaters.  Seriously!  It is 9 pm and hardly anyone came to our house!  Anyway, it was eldest daughter and her friends who greatly profitted from the fact that we had had so few children stop by.  I unloaded a lot of candy on them.  DH did the candy shopping this year and did “okay” — but he bought those peanut butter thingies in the orange wax paper wrappers — OMG!  I gave away a lot of those!  Ish…

Unlike Surly, I have not knitted half a Ballerina in the past week, but I have been plugging away on Lyra.  I’m on about the 117th round.  The rounds are incredibly long at this point.  I’ve made a couple of small mistakes, but corrected them and moved on.  If I ever see my camera again I’ll post a blob picture.

Lyra is what I work on at home and Plisse goes to work with me each day.  That is not good news for Plisse!  I have been too busy at work to take breaks so her progress is greatly stilted. 

The pattern stitch is somewhat annoying.  The right side is plain knitting, but the wrong side moves from rib to garter.  If you are not paying attention (and it is hard to see from the WS), it’s easy to make a mistake.  The yarn is a gorgeous color with bits of bright teal green and yellow mixed in.  The picture color is very true. 

I broke down and ate one (well, two; OKAY, three) of those peanut butter thingies.  I think they changed the formula in the last 40 years — they’re not too bad 🙂 !

Thanks to all for the kind words about Roslin and also for pointing out a couple of mistakes.  I added a Roslin Errata page (in the upper righthand corner, above the pattern link) which will have a running list of all the corrections that are made along the way.  The pattern link will have the current, most up-to-date and “error-free” version 😉 — hey, we never claimed to be perfect!

PS — how cute is that jack o’lantern of Batman???

PSS — in response to Anne:  I hope that the yarn you are considering has both weights: dk and fingering, or else the transition will not work.  Thanks!

Oops.

There are two small errors in the pattern with respect to the colors used in the Fair Isle insert. First, we neglected to list Pacific in the materials needed. You should purchase one skein of Simply Shetland 2-ply in Pacific (763) in addition to the other colors listed. Second, although we correctly told you to purchase a skein of Sunset (186), the chart calls it Sunrise, which is a much darker color. We love both of those colors and ALWAYS mix them up for some reason. We apologize for the confusion and will update the chart and the pdf as soon as possible.

Re the question about the “yellow” in the photo. It’s not yellow; it is Granny Smith (1140) as listed in the chart and the materials.

Thank you again for your interest and support.

We were both humbled AND inspired by your reaction to the Roslin Fair Isle Hoodie we designed.  Susan worked on the hoodie pattern most of the weekend, and it is ready to be unveiled.  The pattern for the Roslin Fair Isle Hoodie is a free gift to you, our readers. 

There are some disclaimers and suggestions in the pattern.  Please read carefully.  If you find any errors, let us know and we will correct the pdf file.

We hope you enjoy the Roslin Hoodie!

Oops.

There are two small errors in the pattern with respect to the colors used in the Fair Isle insert. First, we neglected to list Pacific in the materials needed. You should purchase one skein of Simply Shetland 2-ply in Pacific (763) in addition to the other colors listed. Second, although we correctly told you to purchase a skein of Sunset (186), the chart calls it Sunrise, which is a much darker color. We love both of those colors and ALWAYS mix them up for some reason. We apologize for the confusion and will update the chart and the pdf as soon as possible.

Re the question about the “yellow” in the photo. It’s not yellow; it is Granny Smith (1140) as listed in the chart and the materials.

Thank you again for your interest and support.

For additional photos, including closeups, click here.

While we each plod along, trying to make progress on some other projects we thought we’d share a sweater we designed together a few months back.  We wanted to create a design that incorporated some fair isle knitting into it.  The challenge was that we wanted the fair isle portion to be in jumperweight yarn, but we didn’t want to have to knit the entire sweater out of such small gauge yarn.

Did we have to? No, we didn’t.  Jamieson has several weights of yarn in the same colors.  Susan came up with an ingenious way to transition invisibly between Jamieson’s Dk weight yarn (3 ply) and Spindrift (2 ply). Sally did the playing around with colors and design for the fair isle band and did virtually all of the actual knitting (that’s only fair — it was knit to her size).  Susan did the math.  Who got the better deal?

Sally adapted the fair isle design from a typical Shetland-style pattern. Here’s a photo of one of the original swatches.

The sweater features a hood, raglan sleeves, and a “kangaroo” pocket. Here are several views of the finished sweater:

 

Susan came up with the idea for a cute little pocket on the sleeve. Here is a close up view — isn’t the button cute?

Finally, this picture shows how nice the transition looks from 3-ply to 2-ply.   

 

The knitted weight of each section is identical: the fair isle band and the body of the sweater have the exact weight and feel. 

The sweater fits Sally perfectly and is great for fall.  Susan keeps threatening to knit one up and by doing so enlarge the pattern — a lot.  Right now it exists as a “one size fits few.”  We debated sending it off to try to be published, but that would require a lot of brain activity from a very dormant brain. 

Mom would be so proud: we have finally learned to play well together!