Pictures of cardigan

Here are pictures of the front and back of my Half Circle Cardigan. It is quite bulky. The pattern called for sock weight yarn, but I could not see my going to that effort. Besides it would have taken 10 balls of sock weight and I did not want to spend that much on this cardigan. I made a swatch in the yarn that I was going to use and used the row gauge on that instead of the sock yarn gauge it called for. It is warm and I think cute, but my Love says it hides my curves! I really like the slow variegation of the colors in this yarn. I used Caron Shadow yarn, gasp acrylic!!!! Sorry, it comes in great colors.
If you love brainless, mindless knitting, you will love this pattern. It does have a bit of measuring and math that you have to do. Be aware of the sleeve decrease, or lack of decrease problem. I fixed it by knitting 2 tog on the K2 sections of the last wrong side row.


I spun a half of a bobbin of yarn, yesterday. I do not know how many yards that is, but according to my estimations, I can produce 100 yards of single ply in 1 hour. If I want to make a shawl, I need to spin approximately 2300 yards of single ply to get about 1000 yards of double ply yarn. A 1000 yards would make a nice size shawl. Once I ply the yarn, it will be about sock weight gauge. I figure that about 24 hours of spinning will get me there. I don't think that is going to happen anytime soon! I did find out that it is nice way to catch up on the download from my favorite sites. I found some great talks that were given at some ladies retreats on the http://girltalk.blogs.com/.
I downloaded them all and now I have a great reason to spin.

More Lyra progress

I have made great Lyra progress. I am now at Rnd 95. I probably will not make progress on it this weekend. I have been feverishly working on my Lyra because the Half Circle Cardigan (my other project) was boring me to tears. As everyone who knows me knows, I cannot sit and do nothing!!!!
I am on the back portion of the cardigan. I have to do K2, P2 ribbing on 146 sts for 132 rows. The progress just seems to be so slow and boring. I was beginning to hate the fact that I had even started it, wondering if it would even look good on me. I hate to spend a long time on a project and then just hate it. I love the variation of the colors on the yarn I am using. A knitting/church friend came over yesterday to have me help get her back on track on a pair of socks. She had a fit over the colors in the yarn, it made me see that it really was very lovely. Isn't that just like a knitter? I got her on track with her knitting and she got me back on track with mine. So this weekend, I am going to be trying to finish my Half Circle Cardigan through the 132 rows of the back. Here is a picture of the weird shape. Of course, the choice of color is no surprise. I love autumn shades.

When I finish this, I am going to reward myself with a new mindless knitting project. I have a pattern that I bought from my local yarn store that is called diagonal cardigan. It calls for Noro yarn, but I plan on substituting JoJoland worsted weight. It, too, is a slow variegating yarn, but a lot softer that the Noro. They both call for the same gauge on the label. This cardigan is made all in garter. It consists of 3 squares made on the diagonal. The back is one square and the two fronts are the other 2. The excess on the fronts fold back in a chic lapel that you can set off with a great shawl pin. The square is made by starting out with 2 sts and all the rows are (increase in first st, knit across). Once you get to a certain width diagonally, you decrease the first st and knit across until you are back to 2 sts. The sleeves are just plain garter. If you click on the JoJoland word above it will show you the colorway that I plan on using. I hope to be able to work on this on my Jefferson City trip in March. It will make a great road trip project.
In the design department, I am experimenting with multi-directional crochet. I love multi-directional knitting and think the same idea in crochet would be very interesting and great fun.