Let's have a party in the garden!

Mostly, today I am happy because the sun is shining, the clocks have changed so the sun is still shining in the garden when I get home and it is a great day for photographing finished things!



So.... I present my garden party!

Vital statistics:

Pattern - Garden Party Shawl by Fiberdreams
Yarn - Cecilia Cobweb weight silk/cashmere blend from Posh Yarn (colourway Sweet). I used 66g of a 100g skein.
Needles - Knitpicks 3mm circulars
Modifications - I made the shawl a lot bigger then the pattern stated as mentioned in some detail here.
Finished dimensions - 34" by 70"



And other than blocking my garden party, I have been knitting the back of my holiday cardigan. I am now onto the armhole shaping so feeling as though some progress is being made. The complicated calculations are over, the combining the cables in the middle is done, and all I have to do is carry on moving the cables outwards towards the shoulders. Then all I need to do is finish the sleeves and make the armholes fit. Hmmmm.

Messing round at the Garden Party

I am now nearly finished on my garden party. Adding the border is taking quite a while though, mostly my own fault for making lots of modifications (sorry for the quality of the photo - the flash makes the yarn's subtle and lovely colour variations stand out much more than they do in real light)

I swatched for this project, because I was using cobweb weight yarn from Dee at Poshyarn and had a good hunch that it would be too fine on 3.75mm needles. I tried 2.75mm, 3mm and 3.25mm, and in the end plumped for the 3mm knitpicks.

The shawl construction on this is lovely and interesting. First you knit a thin strip of leaves. Then you work the right side, joining onto the leaves, then the left, and finally some rows all the way across before adding a knitted on border. Because I was using smaller needles, and had 1300yds of yarn available, I thought it would be good to make the shawl a little bit bigger than advertised.

There were two obvious ways to do this and I have done both. Firstly, I added 4 extra repeats of the leaf pattern (40 rows) to the centre panel. Then, correspondingly, I knit an extra 5 repeats (40 rows) of the rosebud lace pattern onto each side.

A careful stitch count showed that I had the wrong multiple of stitches for the start of the lacy lattice (I was 2 short), but this was quickly sorted out by replacing two of the p3tog with p2tog on the first row of the lattice.

Once the lacy lattice was established, it was just a question of plugging away along rows that really were getting very very long. I did some complicated maths to try and work out how much lattice I needed to knit so that I had the right number of stitches for the border, I got it wrong a couple of times, and eventually kept knitting until I had 409 stitches in total. By this point the rows were taking a very long time.

I also started the border a different place to that stated in the pattern. I just preferred the thought of starting right at the point rather than on row 9 as stated. And all this mean that I had, instead of 8 repeats of the border along each edge, 12 instead, and there was still a stitch or two to fudge. But there are always stitches to fudge when applying edging! Given that it is on average taking me just under an hour to do a repeat this is quite a bit of extra border knitting. Still, only 6 more to go so I should finish this week!

Xtreme Knitting

Today, I am going to be smug about the weather! It has been lovely and sunny and not even too windy.

I have started lace knitting again. I have secured myself some lovely silk/cashmere cobweb weight lace yarn (Cecilia) from Posh Yarn next week. Lovely not quite solid orangy red, a colour way called Sweet. And I have cast on for the Garden Party shawl, and there is a fantastic knitalong on the Posh Yarn group on Ravelry. I didn't have any yarn in the stash that would have been suitable so I had to wait for the next sale day, and then wait for it to arrive, and then wind it, so it was yesterday before I got to cast on,

Today was a pre-arranged day out with my Husband. I snuck the knitting in the car, and we headed for Torridon, because for once the forecast was best in the west. We were going to walk up a little hill and get some photos of Liathach because it was looking all pretty and covered in snow.

But we were too lazy so we went bouldering instead.....


Husband looking heroic - and me trying very hard.

Look at that gurn!

And then, because Husband was having a nap in the sun, I snuck my knitting out of the bag and managed a good few repeats of the rose pattern which makes up the first part of the shawl.


It was a lovely day for al-fresco knitting, though I am worried about us turning native - we spend the whole day saying how warm it was and how lovely the sun was. We were even sitting round in t-shirts for part of the day. It was 6 C.