I wrote this post last night in Adelaide and was pretty much done when Mum’s dog tore past the table, got tangled in the phone cable and pulled my laptop off the table, sending it flying across the room, thus ripping the screen from the case and rendering it utterly useless. I am currently computerless while Jesse transfers my harddrive back to my old (OLD) machine and prays to the insurance gods for a replacement laptop.

Thanks to everyone who offered advice on the pattern for Carla, with your help (particularly all the email support from Nancy) I managed to finish writing out the tricky part of the top down version of the patter. So today I swatched. I have to say I am a little confused, Nancy felt that a yarn forward was not the same thing as a yarn over, and Montse Stanley agrees. But clearly if I knit the pattern with a yarn forward (which does not create a stitch) there would very shortly be no stitches left at all. I don’t know if the call for a yarn forward is a mistake or if, despite studying the text and photos of my Knitter’s Handbook I don’t quite get it. I went ahead and knit the swatch using what I think is a yarn over and the pattern looks correct to me. If anyone who has made Carla can confirm that my swatch looks right I would be deeply grateful.

Of course this swatch was knitted flat. And, funnily enough my edge stitches are unusually neat and the pattern is very simple knit flat. So do I try to figure out how to reverse the pattern and continue on with the top down idea or do I just follow the pattern as written? Oh, and how much do you stretch out such a lacey pattern stitch to check your gauge? All these questions and more must be answered before I can continue…

In other news I went shopping. The other day while buying the rest of the fabric for Isabelle’s quilt I picked up a couple of skeins of Katia Nordic to make a Buttonhole bag for a friend. I got it home and realised I would need two or three times as much yarn as I had, which would be two or three times my budget for the project. Today I took it back and exchanged it for this instead:

It’s going to be a Market Squares Bag and I got so excited I bought this too:

You guessed it - a second Market Squares Bag. I am really looking froward to doing these but they will have to wait until after Carla, Peach Jacket, Isabelle’s Debbie Bliss Cardi, Isabelle’s Poncho, my Jo Sharp vest, you get the picture…