Yay! The start of my weekend, since I work 4 days a week. First off, thanks to all of you who have responded ‘in droves’ to our survey — very interesting comments!! We will certainly share our findings and also try to incorporate some of your ideas and suggestions.
I started off the day today with a therapeutic massage for my wrist and things felt “different” — in a good way. I think progress is being made.
Progress or not, I have been doing a little bit of knitting. As Sally mentioned in a previous post, we are both knitting Taiga — a bulky-weight vest with a gorgeous accent of stranded knitting.
As I said, I chose my colors poorly. They went together quite well on the face of things, but the stranding did not show up at all…not enough contrast between the two colors. Unfortunately, I did not take a picture of the original colorwork (doh!) but the colors are below:
You can see that the colors are kind of cute together. I chose the orange because it matched some of the slubs in the grey tweedy yarn. The choice of orange was a bit “out of the box” for me — funky and fun and not like other things I have.
Well. I crawled back into my box!! After seeing Sally’s DARLING version with the pale green and dark purple, I had to jump on board. The purple is fantastic and I am very pleased. It killed me to rip out my colorwork because my knitting time is so limited and RE-knitting is absurd, but it had to be done.
The pattern has you do the stranding back and forth, which I did the first time around. Annoying but okay. But, no way was I going through that again, so I added a steek for the new color. To add the steek I ended at the end of a RS row, cast on 8 sts and then knit around again. I then added the purple and started the chart. When I finished the chart, I cast off the steek and kept going with the purple. Easy peasy.
Some knitters suffer from “steek anxiety.” I never suffered this ailment. Cutting my knitting never bothered me — even Alice St@rmore told me she had never seen anyone cut their first steek with such glee! I think the reason I am not bothered by cutting the steek is that it marks the next stage in the project — if you don’t cut it, you can’t finish it.
For the steek averse among you, I chronicled my steek surgery in photos (the color is very true in these photos):
Steek Close Up
At the machine
Starting to Cut
More…
All done!!
I often place something hard, like a book or cutting board, underneath the steek so I don’t cut the wrong thing (like strands from the other side of the knitting!). I didn’t really need it here because of how short the steek was and easy to see, etc. The book is Starmore’s Book of Fair Isle Knitting — a true classic!!
I kept going and finished the front pockets and am now doing the bottom half of the vest. This is supposed to be a quick knit in bulky yarn, but it doesn’t FEEL quick! It is not as easy for me to knit with bulky, chunky, tweedy yarn and large needles.
This project is really cute, though, and actually fits so far. I know people thought they couldn’t wear the bulky knits, calling themselves too “fluffy,” but I am not the smallest cherub in the choir by a long shot and it looks okay. I don’t feel like it makes me look any bigger than other knits.
Progress so far…
I still have to take it slow on the knitting, but should get this done soon. Maybe I can find a vest that knits itself!
Enjoy your weekend and your knitting!!
PS to Renee who said, “The skein of orange yarn looks like there should have been enough contrast next to the gray.” I agree! It looked like it should work. It just didn’t. I think the super tweediness of the gray overwhelmed the orange. It needed a solid, dark color.
