Monday, February 15, 2010

I finished something!

Stop the presses! Although... to be fair, it's not quite finished. It's blocking at the moment, after which it will get buttons. But.. 95% done!



That's Carson's, er, Christmas sweater. Oops. Starsky Jr. is the pattern, knit with US size 5 (3.75 mm) needles on Cascade Superwash. I made the arms a little extra-long, adding most of the length in the ribbing, so it would be easy to fold back for now and then wear a few more years, I hope, by rolling down the sleeves.

But I had one problem I didn't think of — on which side do you seam the arms? I did it the same way the whole length of the arm, but now when you fold back the ribbing, you see seam. Of course, if I did the ribbing with the seam out, then when you didn't fold it back, you'd see seam. If I were knitting this again I'd probably knit the sleeves in the round, at least for the length of the ribbing.

I had a lot of trouble with the shawl collar/short rows. I have a rather haphazard method of picking up wraps — I use one method sometimes, another method others, and sometimes I randomly pick up what look like forgotten wraps. I think that last was the problem — there are weird little blobs or whorls around the collar (that sounds attractive, but they are not) which I cannot fix with duplicate stitch. And I am far too lazy to do it again, so whorly they'll stay.

In other news, some things think it's spring here:



And does anyone know what this bulb is? Faintly scented, very tall and pretty:



4 comments:

Earin Marybird said...

Very, very nice on the Christmas sweater. I have problems with Cascade 220 Superwash stretching on me. With the current sweater I am working on I machine washed it then put it in a hot dryer. I attempted this after reading a few comments on Ravelry. It helped bring things back into shape but you do have to keep an eye on it.

Such a pretty color too.

As to the bulb...I've seen it before...some type of geranium perhaps? I will look in my books.

sheep#100 said...

Great pink sweater! We here are wearing wool socks, just so you know.

Anonymous said...

What a pretty sweater! I'm sure no one but you will notice the short row blobs and whorls.

JustJen said...

Christmas is a state of mind, yes? Adorable sweater!

And while, on the one hand, I love your spring pics, on the other hand I'm a bit annoyed that we're having spring in the PNW. 49F/9C isn't appropriate for a low in Feb, dangit!

If this keeps up, I may need to paint my toenails...