Friday, July 14, 2006

Back to "Irish Moss"

I'm trying to work on some back-burner projects before letting myself start anything new. So, the project I'm concentrating on at the moment is "Irish Moss", which I started back in January before embarking on the FLAK sweater.

I finished the back and started the fronts on July 3, knitting both at the same time with two skeins of yarn so they'd match. I could probably have cast on and knitted the fronts along with the back, eliminating the side seams, in retrospect. The fronts are now done, and I bound them off to the back at the shoulders last night and started the sleeves.

Will try to remember to take and post pics.

I'm really liking this project -- it's designed so that you don't need a cable needle, as the big "cable" uses a traveling stitch and the smaller cables are really faux cables, where you pick up the third stitch and knit it from the front, then go back and knit the first two. The problem with that is that the cables aren't really as three-dimensional as real cables. Another annoyance about this pattern is the zig-zag small cable -- you have to 'zag' it back when knitting the wrong side, which I find annoying (I like to knit back without patterning on lace and cables, apparently). If I were redoing this sweater, I'd make those cables into simple two-stitch regular cables, where you twist them on the right side and just purl on the wrong side.

This sweater is definitely going faster than the FLAK. I think that's because the cabling is done without a needle -- and, googling today, I found Wendy Johnson's tutorial on cabling without a needle (doing real cables, not faux ones). I'll have to try that next time.

Speaking of which, the next project will either be the Fiona sweater from Autumn House Farm, knitted (probably, pending swatching) in Brown Sheep Worsted (color: Stone), or the Fair Isle-type sweater kit I bought at MSW from Philosopher's Wool. I can't remember exactly which kit I bought, but I think it was in the Fall colorway. I really like their Kilim jacket, but am sure that's not the one I bought.

But first to finish Irish Moss, some socks I started a long time ago, and decide whether to abandon the red cotton sweater I started last summer. Starting the new project will be my incentive/reward.

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