I finally finished the last round-neck pullover piece yesterday.

After finishing the first piece I started swearing that this will be the last time I ever knit a plain sweater on size 3mm needles. I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly when I chose this Panda Cotton sock yarn at the last minute during the “heat” of summer. At that time I couldn’t imagine working on a heavy wool sweater.

It’s not that I don’t like Panda Cotton – it makes a lovely fabric that drapes well. I just got so bored with knitting plain old stockinette. Also, I’m not too thrilled with this “feminine camouflage” colorway but was pleasantly surprised that the colors didn’t pool too badly.

Karen asked about my camera. It’s a Nikon Coolpix P4 with VR and 8 megapixels. VR stands for “vibration reduction” which means that it’s suppose to help reduce blurry photos. VR works most of the time but I was very disappointed recently when most of the photos taken at the Nordic Knitting Conference turned out blurry. Over all, it’s a good click and shoot pocket camera but the key to taking good photos is to make sure there is plenty of light and to use Photoshop for touch ups.

Raglan
It’s almost done!

Only the neck is left to do. Not sure what we’ll do with it. Jean said to bring needles in a variety of sizes to the next class.

So far I’m satisfied with the results except for the 1×1 rib along the bottom edge of the body and sleeves. If you look closely (click on the photo) you can see how loose the stitches are. It looks sloppy even though I did use a smaller needle size.

I’m sure a 2×2 rib would look better but I really had no choice in the matter. On each sweater we’re learning specific finishing techniques and for this sweater one we needed to learned how to do an invisible bind off for 1×1 rib in the round.

I’m hoping it will look better after a little blocking or steaming.

Vest

Here are my finished vest pieces (front and back) laying folded in half on top of their corresponding life-sized patterns.

Notice the grids drawn on each armhole and neck. We draw them using special rulers that correspond to our stitch/row count. Once the grid is drawn we determine the decrease steps and trace them out using a color pencil.

If you’d like to use a similar technique I’d suggest using this grid paper  from www.tata-tatao.to.

Round Neck pullover

One of our assignments for the last class was to have both pieces (front and back) knitted to the armhole. For the class in two weeks were suppose to finished those pieces plus knit both sleeves.

Earlier this week Sophie decided to check my work. Good thing she did. Turns out I hadn’t cast on the correct amount of stitches! On top of that mistake, my attempt to shape the waist by going down a needles sized didn’t quite work for the way I drew the pattern. Unfortunately I’ve spent the past week redoing most of what I had done for the last class. With luck and diligence I should be able to finish the sleeves soon and then I’m free to work on any project I please. At this point I don’t dare let myself get tempted with other projects.

Lately I’ve been itching to spin. I’m sure these two would love a change of pace as well.