Poppies

When I put away the green and pink balls of yarn I bought for poppies I decided to photograph the swatches - and the failed attempt at a Chanel jacket. Kafee Fasset has no words to wisdom to offer on fit - but he does have the answer to the colour problem. He says that if the colours are not working, what you need is 20 more colours! Hopefully, now that I'm knitting Lucy Neatby's way, I'll learn how to control my tension, and by the time I can knit a garment that's the right size, I'll have the extra 40 colours tucked away in the stash ready to start knitting again. I like some of the colourways, but overall, it's just not right.

Finished the practice swatch for the Turbulence cable panel - hurray! I went wrong once at the top, but I think I'll go back to the real garment now.

Turbulence Cable Swatch

This swatch would have looked neater if I'd done a garter border, but hey, Inner Neat Freak, hush your mouth! This is a swatch for a practice for the real thing. Let's not get too picky.

It's going pretty good - only one mix up - can you see it? There's a kind of lump where I purled a cable instead of knitting it. It will be a few days before I can get back to it because of college and a trip to a concert, but hopefully it'll be done on Friday.

It was a lot easier to concentrate on just the cable - and of course, a lot quicker. Another time I'd do the practice swatch first. I lost so much time going wrong, re-knitting great long rows, frogging again, re-knitting great long rows...as usual, the longer way round is often the fastest.

Seams the Neatby Way & A New Project

Nobody likes seaming, do they? But I did almost enjoy using mattress stitch for the sides of Tangerine Alef - I did as Lucy Neatby said on her DVD. I carefully examined the edge stitch, making sure I had a full stitch, and I carefully went under every bar. Ahh! Pause for big sigh of satisfaction. Beautiful seams, really, truly, honestly beautiful seams, even in tangerine acrylic.

Have nothing to do with those books that tell you to do mattress stitch every few bars - do it Lucy's way. One stitch per bar gives a perfect result, and it doesn't take very much longer at all.

The next job is sewing on the button bands - as yet I don't have a DVD by Lucy Neatby to help me through the process. I got out an instruction book, but the rinky-dink diagram for overcasting made my head ache, so I didn't do any more seaming. I made a swatch for my next project instead - Norah Gaughn's wonderful U-necked Turbulence sweater.

The test yarn is Paton's Laguna- pure cotton double knit. I'm not sure of the vintage. It was a charity shop special @ £1.99 for 10 balls. I suspect the yardage might be a bit mingy, so I'm going to do the back, then the front, then divide what's left in half for what might be rather short sleeves. The real garment is going to be knit in some delicious dark purple Jaeger that I got in a sale - the extra fine merino has been discontinued now, but handling it is like stroking kittens (as the wonderful Yarn Harlot would say). What I do know now (thanks to Lucy) is that it is a single ply yarn, and it will bias, which might cause problems.

Even without potential bias trouble, I know better than to launch into even a simple looking pattern in the 'real' yarn. There are so many, many ways I can mess up a jumper - and the merino is fragile. It doesn't like being messed with (I'll tell you sometime how I discovered this, the hard way, naturally), so, on with the test garment.

I'm knitting it on 3 mm needles. This gives a slightly small gauge - but it's a style that will look OK with some negative ease, my knitting tends to expand, and cotton stretches, so I think it will work out OK.