Sunday, November 25, 2012

Good Weekend

What a great weekend! 4 days of family and fiber. I spent Thanksgiving with family enjoying wonderful food and company and then spent the next 3 days ignoring the shopping craze at home knitting and quilting.

First up - a picture of the lap afghan I finished on the knitting retreat weekend. I kept forgetting to get a pic of it up but finally decided to take one even if the colors aren't great. This is meant to be a cat free afghan so people who come to visit can use it.

 
It was on the bed for about 2 minutes and the cat-free thing lasted about 1 minute. Fortunately, Chief never got further than that corner and only for a minute so it's still mostly cat-free.
 
I'm making a few items for Christmas and this is all I can show of this weekends quilting. It's part of a bigger "thing" but this is all I can show till its given away. I'm liking how it is turning out considering it is a first time try at designing quilting with my new sewing machine.



Bad Sweater Pattern Writing
So, I started making this sweater a little while ago. I changed it so I was making both front and the back at the same time. I was well along the way when I realized the pattern was one of those that tell you how to do something and then says, "oh, by the way, you should have started doing another thing back several inches ago". So, I decided to rip out the last 3 inches to get back to the spot where I should have started the 2nd shaping thing. While ripping out I realized the sweater was going to be way too big for me and I ripping all6 inches and started over with 40 fewer stitches.

Then half way through the Celtic knot looking cable in the middle I discovered I had been making all the cables the same direction and that's not a good thing. Instead of being a Celtic knit looking thing it was kind of like ribs all leaning one direction. Yup- that 6 inches was ripped out and reknit.


 
In the process of all this I ended up writing up a spreadsheet that had all the shaping stuff for each row. Different cables have different timing as to when it happens plus buttonholes and side shaping. Once I got to the collar there were all sorts of things going on: collar increases, neckline decreases, cables moving around, armhole shaping. Busy, busy, busy.
 
I love setting up spreadsheet to make knitting basically brainless. Much better than going from page 1 to page 3 to page 2 and so on. So, now I'm finally done with armhole shaping and almost done with collar shaping. Only a couple cables are still being made and I even have a few rows where its just knit the knit-purl the purl. I think I may be back on track.
 

Between knitting and quilting and watching old TV shows there was a lot of resting. Chief and Bert seem to have this resting thing done to a fine honed science.


 
Hope your weekend was as good as mine was.

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