I'm officially half way now. Not only that, but I have weaved in the ends of yarn. I did a huge weaving in session at the end of row 2, and then I have done each block as it was finished. I'm so glad I have done that, as the mammoth weaving in session of only 2 rows was bad enough. Doing 8 rows in one sitting would have been just too depressing for words.
I would have made better progress if it wasn't the lure of the dreaded Kemps. If you have never heard of Kemps Woolshop, you will have a larger bank balance left than the rest of us. Kemps are an ordinary yarn shop, that also happen to get ends of lines and clearance colours. This means they have a really big clearance section on their website that has amazing bargains. They are so amazing they are impossible to resist. On this particular occasion I was seduced by the Ethical Twist yarn.
This yarn is 70% organic wool and 30% alpaca. It feels light and fluffy, like wool, and soft and silky, like alpaca. I imagine it will be incredibly warm because of the loft of the yarn, despite only being double knit weight, though I believe it verges on the heavy side of that weight. This yarn is beautiful and I chose the Camel colour as paler shades wash me out. Each skein is 100g and Kemps is selling them at £2.50 each. I believe that all this explains my moment of madness with my debit card.
No matter how much I love my vivid shades of hand dyed glory from BabyLongLegs, I still adore un-dyed yarn. I love being able to see the natural origins of my garment. When a yarn has less processing, I somehow feel closer to the original knitters, our ancestors in craft. I know this is ridiculous as our ancestors had little to do with alpacas in the UK, but you get my drift, don't you?
This recent purchase has tempted me away from my baby blanket knitting and led me by the hand to more selfish knitting. I am knitting a top down fitted cardigan. My inspiration comes from a pattern from Interweave Knits, called Essential Cardigan, by Laura Grutzeck.
I really liked this garment and I actually have the pattern, but I wanted it to be a little more tailored and longer. As I was going to be doing maths I thought I'd just work the whole thing out from scratch. This is how much I have got knitted, so far.
It's not very far, I know, but I did have to do lots of maths, especially for the short row shaping around the bust. If you didn't know already, I have a tutorial on this subject here, and a worksheet to help work this out, which you can find here.
Now I've done the tricky working out stuff, I hope this cardigan will grow more quickly. I hope this process is quick because the weather is getting progressively colder and I need more woollies to wrap up in!
