Saturday 8 November 2014

knit on


I am knitting again! Woohoo!

My replacement needles arrived (curiously this didn't make the missing needle turn up again, which is what usually happens in such situations) and I've been cracking on with this cabled headband thing.  It's a plaited cable ear warmer* and I found the pattern in a book from the library.  Er,  just checking, the book is Simple Knitting by Ros Badger. Mostly I knit with 4-ply and tiny needles so to knit with aran and 4.5mm feels really decadent. It's such an easy pattern, so the whole thing is knitting up at warp-speed. Except when I spot a stupid mistake a few rows back and then spend some time un-knitting and re-knitting the same three rows over and over because the beautiful luscious purple is so dark that, except in daylight (of which we are in short supply at the moment), I can't really see what I'm doing. It's more purple than it is in my picture actually.

I could have ripped back to the last turquoise lifeline, but I was feeling stubborn and I wanted to know what I'd done. Still, it's sorted now! The lifelines are mostly there to make it easier to count the pattern repeats, and actually, because I just really like the way that turquoise looks with the purple.  The luscious purple is a Noro yarn I got at a P/hop yarn-swap event raising money for MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières). It's wonderfully soft and squishy, so it's a pleasure to work with even if it's tricky to see in low light. I'll forgive it!

Médecins Sans Frontières
Médecins Sans Frontières)
The reason I was able to throw myself back into knitting is that I finished my OU assignment with plenty of time to spare - submitted electronically on Thursday, a day early in fact. In all my academic adventures I don't believe I've ever submitted an assignment early before!  So I spent all of yesterday bouncing around with that kind of enthusiastic well-being you only get after handing in an assignment, the kind that makes it almost worth the shuffling of multiple pages of notes, the muttered swearing and eventually the sense of resignation ('it's probably rubbish but it'll have to do') that characterised the preceding few days. Of course on Thursday night I had a dream that it had been marked and I'd only got 48% - let's hope not!


UPDATE:  aargh, no, I've just clicked on that picture and spotted another mistake - some of my cables are not plaiting. I'd jotted the pattern down in a small notebook rather than carrying the library book around, but I've written it down wrong and I've had the cable needle in front instead of behind for row 7 in the last three pattern repeats. D'oh.. such a numpty.. Three-fifths wrong, that's fairly impressive even for me! I'm pleased now that I left all those lifelines in.



*for plaited cable ears?

2 comments:

Annie Cholewa said...

Oops! But it's still a stunning colour, plaited or not :)

Well done on the early assignment submission ... that beating a deadline to a pulp feeling is great isn't it.

Peeriemoot said...

Just realised I forgot to reply to this - yes, I could get hooked on beating deadlines :-).