Friday, September 19, 2008

The body may be weak but the mind never quits knitting....

While I was laying in a codeine/morphine/gravol haze my brain was busy thinking...knitting, of course. I have 6 balls or 2280 meters of Jawool 49% wool 35%cotton 16% nylon sock yarn. I bought this deliberately for a sweater. It has been languishing, in good company, in my cedar chest. however, the more I thought about it the more I realized I did not want a horizontal stripe sweater. So the yarn was put aside. Whilst I was in the hospital and when I first came home I was too weak to do anything but recline like a damsel with the vapours. My knittin' brain was busy planning a new pattern. I have a sock yarn Henley I knit when I moved to London, we call it the "London sweater"..duh.., this jumper has a bell shaped sleeve I really really like. So it will be a given that the next sweater will have the same shaped sleeve. Good starting point.


For the swatch I cast on around 37 stitches and commenced knitting. My idea is to knit the body side to side which of course will result in a vertical stripe. I turned the swatch sideways to look at it. Hmmmmmm....the stripes will be much narrower due to the number of stitches I will have to have on the needle. The sleeves will have wider stripes, once again a result of the stitch count.
Once the swatch dries I will be able to take measurements and armed with my trusty calculator I will start to write the pattern. I have a couple of ideas I would like to use: invisible cast on, 3 needle cast off, grafting (Kitchener Stitch), short rows and of course I will use "EPS" for a good fit. I was reading in one blog how it would be convenient if sweater designers would tell you what size the sample sweater was and the size of model wearing said sample. Sounds like a damn good idea to me. I will take this into consideration when I am finished. Get back to you later..... Meanwhile back to the pink lace! ~Mum

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