Wednesday, February 23, 2011

WIP: Georgia

WIP - Georgia
Oops! I meant to blog about this a few days ago but the weekend was a blur of work, sleep, and endless "terrible twos" tantrums. There was a fair bit of knitting taking place because of the latter but trust me when I say that there was also an equal amount of un-knitting happening too.

So this here is my fourth project for 12 in 2011. It's the Georgia cardigan by Jane Richmond. It's a top-down, fitted, and seamless cardigan that is knit in one piece (my favourite type of pattern!) and I'm knitting it out of SweetGeorgia Yarns Cashluxe Fine in the Oxblood colourway (one of my favourite yarns!). This pattern is a fairly easy and simple knit so you would think that it would just fly off the needles without any problems. Yeah...technically it should. But since this is me who is knitting this, that isn't the case. I'm knitting this up in a fingering weight yarn. Hand-dyed fingering weight yarn, that is. And with that the first thing that every knitter needs to know is that you should always, always, always alternate skeins when knitting a project with multiple skeins of hand-dyed yarn. Even if the skeins come from the same dye lot, it's a bit rare that all skeins will end up exactly alike. I'll confess that I lucked out when knitting both the Simple & SweetGeorgia Pullover and the Queen Bee cardigan, cause I didn't alternate the skeins at all. I know...bad knitter!!

This time around though, my luck has run out and although they look the same in skein form, the yarn definitely varies in shade. The first skein that I started knitting with is definitely lighter than the second and I'm just glad that I had noticed this before I was halfway through knitting with the first...yes, I'll admit that I didn't start alternating skeins until after I had divided up the stitches for the sleeves. Speaking of which,
another major reason for the un-knitting: I had knit to just before separating the sleeves from the body when I realized that my stitch counts were off. So I tinked back and couldn't figure out where I went wrong. I took a look on Ravelry to see if anyone else had this problem and discovered that the pattern had been updated!! Grrrr!! Since I had downloaded and printed out the pattern before the updated copy, I had no idea! I had spent at least over an hour un-knitting and then re-knitting everything back to where it was. Crap. I hate that. Then to add to that, I had to un- and then re-knit a few more times after that cause I would forget about adding a buttonhole! Oi.

Now I'm knitting the body, which is nothing but pure stockinette (except for the button bands) with no shaping. So I'm really hoping that it'll be smooth sailing from here on in. Or did I just tempt the knitting gods by saying that? Crud...


4 comments:

  1. Great yarn choice, of course!

    Question from a knitting-a-sweater-virgin - do you knit half a skein, then go to the next skein, then go back? How do you alternate with the handpainted skeins?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Areo! :)

    There are several ways to alternate your skeins. You can start at the very beginning and knit a few rows from one skein and then a few from the other and so on. Just drop the working yarn and pick up the other, that way you don't have a bunch of ends to weave in later. Or you could knit an inch and a bit from each skein. Or wait until you're halfway through the first skein to start doing one of the above mentioned to alternate. It really depends on how much of a difference there is in your skeins.

    Basically you just don't want to knit a sweater and have a very distinct line as to where you ended the first skein and started the next. I hope that helps! :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I can't wait to see this finished! Beautiful colour by the way.

    ...are you going to Fibres West? That is where I bought the yarn for this design :) I'm so excited to go again this year.

    ReplyDelete

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