Three New Sweaters in the Works

I've never grown Amaryllis before, but since we grow Resurrection Lilies, which are really a kind of amaryllis, I think, I decided to give it a try.  Here they are, blooming away by the birdbath.  I don't know if they will live through next winter, but this is an experiment.

There are three sweaters in various degrees of completion at the moment.

These two cardigans will be jackets like my pink one.  The emerald green one has the same garter/eyelet borders, but the navy blue one has plain garter borders.

This cardigan is just for fun, to try out a variegated yarn.  This colorway looks pretty layered over an aqua tank I have which tones down the flashy nature of the yarn.

This is what happens when you produce sweaters so quickly -  you end up with several to sew together and do all the finishing.  We'll see how fast I am able to get them done.  The variegated cardigan is the latest draft of my raglan sweater with a few extra stitches added to the sleeve top.  It seems to fit nicely but you can't really tell until after the first washing.

The leftovers afghan is stalled at the moment though, and the gray and gold sweater is still waiting for its buttons.

Variegated Yarn

After I used up my red/yellow/orange variegated yarn (leftover from an afghan) to make the Flashy Cardigan to wear to Stitches, I was pleased at how well the raglan sweater draft fit.  During a recent  sale at the fabric store, some more variegated yarn was purchased, mainly because there was aqua in the colorway.  I could visualize a cardigan over an aqua tank worn with my tan trousers.  The color repeat is larger in this new yarn, so I was interested to see how the color sections would pool or stripe. The Flashy Cardigan yarn had very short color sections.  Who knows, maybe these fun yarns will come back into fashion!  I doubt it, but who cares?

The Flashy Cardigan

The only thing I wanted to change on my raglan pattern was the top of the sleeve.  There's supposed to be about an inch of stitches left that become part of the neckline, but because the gauge is only 4+ stitches/inch, the seam allowances used up about half of that, so I wanted to add a few more stitches.  Here's how my patterns look when I'm ready to use them:

 All the numbers with circles around them are row count numbers to tell me when to make increases or decreases.  This is one feature of a knitting machine that is great, but you can get the same effect with hand knitting by putting a safety pin every 20 rows or so.  That way you can get the row count in a few seconds instead of having to count every row, every time.

The ribbings are knitted ahead of time by hand and are hung on the machine instead of a cast-on.  This gives a more hand-knit look to the garment, and besides, I get to use the cast on that my grandmother taught me.  This picture shows the sleeve ribs waiting in their bowl.

 

 

 

So far I've finished the back and front:

Look at the funny pooling on the upper back!  You can never tell ahead of time what will develop.  As usual, I am wondering if there is enough yarn, since I only have one and a half skeins left, but time will tell.  It's not as if a dye lot difference will be noticeable.

Socks!

The afghan I am working on is proceeding slowly, but in the meantime, I finished the first pair of socks I have knitted in over a year!

The repeat was so large in this yarn that I would have had to splice the yarn somewhere, so I just knitted an asymmetric pair.  The yarn is some Sockotta I picked up from a sale table at Stitches about two years ago for only $5 a skein.  Sockotta can seem hard to knit unless you have the right needles (bamboo or wood are horrible for this) since it has a lot of cotton in it.  I've used it to make several pairs of socks for the girls, and they say it is comfortable to wear.

In future sweater news, the two sweaters that I have enjoyed the most out of the 9 or so sweaters I made recently are the pink jacket and the aqua lace.

I have plans to make more of these.  The aqua one would look nice in a purple, and I want to make the eyelet jacket in a cocoa brown and other colors.  The aqua one could be done in different lace stitches so I will have to look through my stitch dictionaries and get some ideas.

Vegetable Garden

This year we are expanding the vegetable garden.  Most of the new space came from back of the yard which used to be covered in awful ivy.  It took months for the spouse to dig it up and take down the old fence it was growing on, but now it is wide open and sunny back there.  There is a chainlink fence dividing us from the back neighbors, and they have said that they hate the fence and will replace it at some point, but in this economy, that may take years.  I've always wanted a chainlink fence to grow things on, so this year I'm planting the squashes and some sweet peas (flower) along there.  The added benefit is that it may shield us from the attempted attacks of their dog, Oscar.  Maybe if he can't see us, he'll ignore us.

Yesterday I got started on the seed starting.  So far, there are sweet peas and lettuces sprouting, but today I'll get going on the squashes and cucumbers.Here are some views of the garden in its wild spring state before the weeding and plowing.

The first climbing rose of the year bloomed this week. I think this is Pinata.

Projects in the Works

Sometimes it is Spring here, and sometimes it is rainy winter, so not much happening on the 'getting the garden going' front.  I have all my seeds but need to get them started.  Inside, there are lots of projects continuting:

The 'Use Up The Leftovers' Afghan

Trying to be efficient about it

A Dark Orchid V-Neck pullover

Socks for A

  It's been a long time since I felt like knitting socks but I'm on a roll now.  The second pair were originally a 'toe-up' pair with the first sock half completed.  I guess I wasn't in the mood for toe-up because those poor socks had been sitting untouched for over a year.  Since it was time to be ruthless, I ripped them out and started again.  I'm a little annoyed with this Sockotta color because the color repeat is so large.  Maybe that was why it was on the sale table at Stitches. I decided not to stress over it and just make some mismatched socks.  My daughter doesn't care, and you can't be perfectly symmetric all the time.  Or so I am telling myself.

Still Unfinished

All the knitting has been done for several weeks, but I got sidetracked starting a new sweater and sewing some blouses, so this neglected cardigan still needs to have its ends darned in and its buttons sewn on.  Other than that, I think it turned out very well, and I want to try another one using a variegated yarn for the colorwork.  After exercising my brain to figure out how to make a pattern fit into the available stitches, I realized that I didn't need to as long as the pattern mirrored itself across the front edges.  What I did was to center the pattern on the center back, then put markers for every pattern repeat around to the center front.  This made the patterns match (mostly) at center front.  Good enough, anyway.

Need a lot of markers for a project?  I just bought a box of brightly colored plastic straws and cut one into thin rounds to use for markers.  The whole box of straws cost less than $2 and I only used part of one straw, so it didn't matter if the marker took a flyer and lost itself under the couch, I just got another one from the container.  Cheap and effective.  Plus, it isn't a tragedy if you accidentally vacuum one up.

New Afghan or Maybe a Baby Blanket

There was a lot of yarn leftover from the African Flower afghan, so I am trying to use up some of that pink.  I had a pound of minty color for the background and some leftovers from the aqua lace cardigan, so those are getting used up also.  My goal is to not buy any more yarn but to just use what there is.  So far, so good.  I'm thinking it will probably end up as a small baby blanket, 5 squares across and 7 squares down.

 It's interesting and much better to crochet the squares together as you go along, but this requires a layout plan before you start.  I'm doing diagonal rows of color.  I found the flat braid method of crocheting them together online:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080112104311/http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/lffunt/flatbraid.htm

http://www.yarncrazy.com/?page=2

It's nice to have a crochet project in the works to pick up when you are tired of sewing a sweater together.  The yoke cardigan is mostly finished except for sewing in the ends and sewing on the buttons.  That was a really interesting knit.