Tuesday 29 March 2011

Capelet

My Burnham Wood Capelet is finally done. And although I'm quite pleased with the end result, I am afraid that it will be too small for my mother. That probably means that I will just have to wear it. I think I can cope with that.






I knitted this with Bendigo Woollen Mills Cameo. This is one of those yarns you find in the famous backroom. This is a fabulously soft yarn but does shed like crazy while knitting with it. After I washed and blocked the capelet I wasn't aware of anymore shedding. I hope it stays that way.

Now I'm going to be saying goodbye for a while. I'm traveling to South Africa and Europe for the next 2 months and I think my internet connection will be rather intermittent. I will try and keep up with your blogs while I am away and if I get a chance to post here I will do so.

Tuesday 15 March 2011

Slow progress

I am working on the capelet but progress is slow. This is partly (or should that be largely?) due to the fact that I keep swapping cable knitting for lace knitting and partly because I need to rip back every now and then. Yes, it's the usual missed cable crossing causing me to have to rip back. Mostly I catch the error quite quickly, because I can assure you its a pain to rip back umpteen thousand stitches (that's what if feels like). Nevertheless, I have discovered an error many rows back and for the time being it will stay there. I will use the cheat's method to repair the mistake when I'm done with the knitting.

Here is a photo of the progress.



To ease the frustration of miscrossed cables I knitted this lace shawl.



It's one of Birgit Freyer's many shawls called Marella. I really like her patterns and intend to knit more of them in the future. This one is done on 5.0mm needles in Bendigo Woollen Mills Luxury 4ply in Lake. The shawl measures 48 x 104cm.

Friday 4 March 2011

A Test Knit

I know I shouldn't be doing this kind of thing when I need to finish this capelet but....

When I saw Celia's Tines shawl and she asked for test knitters, I just couldn't resist. I also thought that it should be a quick knit and thus I could afford to take a break from cables. This took me a week to knit but it shouldn't have taken more than 5 days. One of the reasons it took longer was because I had to rip the lace border. Here's the story:

By the time I reached the lace border I was a bit concerned that I wouldn't have enough yarn. I decided to put in a lifeline and if I ran out of yarn I could just rip back to the lifeline and knit the border in a different colour. Half way through the border I discovered that I had dropped a stitch right at the beginning and just could not repair the damage. So, lucky for me, I could rip back to the lifeline and re-knit the border. And as fate would have it I had enough yarn for the shawl. And another lesson learned: It was because my cable was too short and thus my knitting was all bunched up that I hadn't noticed the drop stitch.






The yarn for this shawl is Bendigo Woollen Mills Luxury 4ply in Ghost. Needles 4.5mm. And the blocked shawl measures 184 x 65cm.