You've been very, very naughty!

I’ve been a bad girl! Hehehe

I have made a start on the felted slippers for my DD. Hers are pink, and mine will be purple and black. I used the Carnival yarn from Big W.
The pattern is Knitting at Knoon's free slipper pattern.
The first one took 3 days to complete and I am halfway through the second one. Now let me just say that this pattern is fantastic, I love it! It is easy to knit and the heel turn is a snap (heel turns worry me) although I do have to practise grafting the toes, ick hopefully the next one won’t be so bad, but as they are felted I’ve heard that the felting process hides imperfections. Fingers crossed. Very happy with them so far.

Here’s the bad part,
I went out to get a circular needle for the Knitting Olympics shawl and shorter needles for the slippers, much easier now, and as the yarn shops are not too far from each other decided to take a trip to both of them.

They sell YoYo!! I didn’t know we could get YoYo in Adelaide!! But the shop didn’t have the colourway I wanted. Love the Damson Mist one, oh well. At least they had the correct needles I wanted needed . The second yarn store also had YoYo, ooh happy dance. The fact that I am awaiting an order, from the UK - more on that when it arrives, didn't stop me, I ended up buying 2 balls one dark blue for a jumper for myself, and one in purple for my DD, she says she would like the hooded jumper from the book that came with the yarn.
Oh, I also spotted the Paris Mohair Sparkle I fell in love with the dark purply pink colour in that and got 4 balls, I thought that it would look good in the triangular shawl pattern. Oh so sparkly and purply.

And when I got home what was waiting for me but this:



The pattern and yarn for my Knitting Olympics project and a couple of back issues of Creative Knitting. The yarn is Karabella's Gossamer and the pattern is the Triangular Shawl. (I couldn’t have worked out how to knit this by myself, I had enough trouble with the bought pattern – see below)

I have also been hunting back issues of the ‘Simply Knitting’ magazine, 3 of them I found on ebay. So that leaves issue number 4 left to get, I’m unsure if it has sold out but I’ll ring them later tonight and find out, now why didn’t I do that in the first place rather than pay double the price on ebay?? I just jump in head first without thinking things through. Driven on by my ‘gotta have’ mentality. I think I really enjoy the hunt and gather part left over from our primitive past.


The Knitting Olympics…

As we are allowed to train swatch before the flame is lit I had a go at getting the shawl started. Oh dear! I started with only 3 sts cast on and even that was bad. The increases were looking terrible, the side edges were icky, loose and horrible, I was nearly in tears, what was I doing wrong?? I was thinking, “I can’t knit this, if I can’t do this what sort of knitter am I?” I even considered giving up knitting for good or just knitting scarves for the rest of my life. It was an emotionally bad time; it was like if I can’t do this simple shawl then I am a complete loser.

Then something inside me kicked in and I thought bugger it it’s not going to beat me. I looked at my small monstrosity of a shawl and took it step by step:

First I started with the cast on edge so I frogged it over and over till I got that looking right. This just needed to be pulled a bit tighter.

Secondly were the increases, the pattern called for a M1 increase and I thought I was doing it the right way but thought to double check it with one of my many knitting books.
It seems there are several ways to do a M1 increase depending whether you want it to slant to the left or right. Whether to slip the yarn between the needles from the back to the front or from the front to the back, and whether to knit it through the back loop or not. Aha! I tested the different angles and yep, perfect increases.
I was angry that I had to work this out for myself, if I buy a pattern then shouldn’t it include the correct increases needed, not just a broad instruction of M1?

Thirdly, the edge stitches needed attention now the pattern just said, Note slip the first stitch of each row. BUT it didn’t say whether to slip knitwise or purlwise, so back to my knitting book. This was easier to find, as it is knit a row and the increases are in this row and the next row is purl, (like stockinette stitch) the edging for this in the book said to slip knitwise on a knit row and purlwise on a purl row. This worked a treat and the difference in the edging is amazing! Note that this is only a practise run and that the yarn and needle size will be different than pictured here.

I am so glad I tried this out first, I can imagine the mess I would have been in if I was doing it for real.

So, I am off to have lunch, tidy the house, clean the bathroom, do the laundry and finish the slippers.

You can see that I've learnt to code/do strikethrough text, I've learnt lots, just look at my sidebar, I've got buttons and links and java percent bars and a sheep, oh my!
*puffs chest out* I even edited the java part where it says not to unless you are a java queen....oh okay, it was just an address change but I uploaded the photos to my photobucket account and linked 'em and they work *wink*