Progress on the right front for the Debbie Bliss Cabled Jacket has been slower than I had hoped. This was partly due to rude interruptions from the rest of my life and partly due to gauge anxiety.

Just before bed last night I finally reached the raglan decreases and it seemed like a good time to see how different it was from the left front. I was too disgusted to take a photo and I went to bed believing that I would now be ripping more than half a sweater today. I knew I had to block it before giving up but I wasn’t hopeful.

How wrong I was. Turns out the 6.5mm needles were just about perfect. This piece was far easier to handle wet than the two pieces knit on larger needles. Gently laid out on a towel, with neither any stretching nor smooshing back into shape, it is exactly the size I was hoping for. Yay! Time for a little ripping (of the back and left front).

I have just finished the ribbing on the next piece of the Debbie Bliss Cabled Jacket and I don’t know which needle to use for the body. Do I go the 6.5mm or the 7mm?

The 7mm is what is suggested for the JS Ultra and is only one size down from what the pattern suggests. But is one size really enough to make that much of a difference? At least it’s bedtime now so I have an excuse for putting off the decision…

So last night I managed to peel the blocked poncho and cable jacket pieces off of the bed just in time so sleep in it. But then I couldn’t sleep (it’s never that simple is it?). I was thinking I should rip it out and start again on smaller needles. The pattern is huge and I was hoping that by knitting it up in the JS Ultra that I would get a slightly smaller end product. Which would almost certainly have happened if I had used the needle size suggested for the Ultra instead of the one suggested in the pattern. Clear thinking? Me? Not so much…

When I got up this morning I found that Steph had left a comment about my cabled jacket. She knit hers on smaller needles and it is just gorgeous. Go on, go have a look. Seeing her lovely sweater has made me feel so much better about this pattern*, but also more sure that I should be frogging what I have done and starting again on a smaller needle. Partly because it is so huge and partly because of the way it wanted to stretch way out of shape when wet, I think the gauge is a bit loose for the yarn and I fear that I will pay for leaving it that way.

What do you think, should I start again? If I do start again do I just use the 6.5mm needle used in the ribbing for the whole thing or should I use a 5.5mm for the ribbing and the 6.5mm for the body? Or a 6.5mm for the ribbing and a 7mm for the body?**

*Am I the only one that wishes Debbie Bliss would provide photos that actually showed the details of the pattern - as well as being pretty to look at? I know that lots of designers do this but DB really seems to make a habit of it.

** The JS Ultra calls for a 7mm. The uses a 6.5mm for the ribbing and a 7.5mm for the body. I have 5.5mm, 6,5mm, 7mm and 7.5mm needles, but no 6mm and I have to mail order needles which I am not prepared to do for this. Now that i have started I need to keep moving.

No, not the sort of sauna some of you in the northern hemisphere seem to be experiencing at the moment. The sort of sauna that is required to dry wet blocked knits with any sort of speed in mid winter.

Last night I finished the left front of the Debbie Bliss Cabled Jacket.

I was very pleasantly surprised by the speed at which it knit up. I was somewhat panicked by the alarming behaviour of the garter stitch button band. So this morning, in the midst of a toddler toilet training debacle (and really I thought we were well past those issues), I washed what seemed like everything I have knit this year and then some. A few of them went outside on the airer. The ones that needed blocking went into my newly devised sauna, previously knows as the “master” bedroom.

The thing about our house is that it contains a small child, a small dog and very little space for anything else. The idea that our bedroom is a “master” anything is so laughable that I am unable to even take a photo to prove my point. The room is so small and so crowded with furniture (ie bed, wardrobe and small desk) that it is simply not possible to take any sort of sensible photo in there (though you can photograph part of the bed if you stand in the hallway). Small items can sometimes be blocked under the desk (one must first relocate all the items normally stored under the desk) but these ain’t no small items and drastic measures were called for.

There is a blocking party happening on my bed right now and I have no idea how I am going to explain it to Jesse when he decides he wants to go to sleep. Given that I like sleep too I have had a blow heater and a fan blowing away in there all day. Well actually they shorted out the power board when I first set them up, so its been about 6 hours of active drying so far. It really is a sauna in there. I so hope we can sleep on our bed tonight.

Oh, and the blocking completely resolved my issues with the garter stitch band, in the process creating a whole new set of fears regarding just how huge this sweater will be. I don’t think it has actually grown that much in the blocking process, but seeing it with the ribbing relaxed and the stocking stitch edges uncurled it looks a whole lot bigger. I wanted a great big cuddly sweater for the really cold days of winter. But at the same time I generally wear fairly fitted (though not tight) clothing as this seems to be more flattering on me. Like most women I am vain enough that I don’t want to end up looking twice the size I actually am. Why is it that you have to be built like a twig to still look slim in bulky clothes and everyone else looks much bigger than they actually are?

The back is done and it ate up exactly one third of my yarn. That long thread you see hanging from the cast off edge at the top is what remains of the 7th skein. This is making me very, very nervous. I believe there is a rule of thumb that the front and back should each take about one third of the yarn and the sleeves together the remaining third. So I should be right on track right? Apart from the part where together the fronts of this cardi are slightly wider than back. Oh and then there is that honking great collar which I expect will need about one and half skeins on it’s own. Hmm. I just called the yarn store and asked them to hold another 3 skeins. I don’t suppose I will be three skeins short, but I would rather not underestimate twice.

I am ready to start the raglan decreases on my Debbie Bliss Cabled Jacket. This cabling business is so fun! I just hope that I find the fronts and sleeves as entertaining. Thanks to Wendy’s excellent tutorial I have been cabling without a cable needle from the start, for the small cables that is. Unfortunately my tension is too tight for me to use this technique comfortably on the horseshoe cables.

Of course I am too slack to have actually bought a proper cable needle. I am sure if I did have one, and perhaps if I consulted a book as to how to use it, I might find cabling with a third needle a little less awkward. But really cabling without the cable needle rocks, so much quicker and easier, so much less fiddly. Hmm, just blogging about my messy third needle technique has given me a number of ideas that might make it easier, like using a dpn instead of a spare circ, and I think I may be holding the “cable needle” in the wrong spot (with my right hand). Hmm. I think I will have more to say about this after a spot of car knitting this afternoon.

In the meantime here is a photo of the small center cables. They don’t exactly match and I am trying oh so hard to tell myself it doesn’t matter. Lets be clear here, the cables match (or are appropriately mirrored), the problem is with my knitting. The edge of each cable which is closest to the centre of the garment has a different look depending on whether it is the leading edge or the final edge of the cable. And this bothers me. Possibly enough to carefully readjust the tension of the left edge of the right cable on each and every row when I am done. Ugh.

Pattern: Lacy Scarf Pattern
Yarn: Eki Riva “Sport” in a pale green (colour “1182″)
Needles: 7mm Addi Turbos

I finished the green scarf off by adding some beads while we were in the mountains. I am not completely happy with these particular beads, but they were the best I could do after a very long time spent in two different bead stores. I thought about taking them off, but in the end I decided that I like the scarf more with them than without.

This scarf turned out to be a great project to concentrate on improving my purl style and I cannot tell you how glad I am to have done this before starting the Debbie Bliss Cabled Jacket. I really think cabling combined style would have driven me quite mad and I am now as comfortable purling in my new way as I was with the combined purl.

After my last post on my purling problems I spent the night experimenting with different ways of improving my purl stitch . Eventually I found that if I held my fingers just so I could purl continental style but still pick the yarn in a way similar to combined style (but in the other direction) rather than having to use a second finger to wrap the yarn manually around the needle.

The next morning Kelly left a comment with this link to a wonderful site, which has videos of a whole variety of purling methods. I had always thought that the Norweigian purl was the same as the combined purl, how wrong I was. I gave it a go and found that I quite liked it, but my tension was looser than anything else yet so I decided to stick with the style I had devised the night before. As it turned out there was also a link to a video of my new style, which apprently may have been the way that EZ purled, so much for my clever new way of purling. Whatever the case I think this new style will continue to improve and as I said earlier, I am very pleased to have sorted it out before starting the cables of the Debbie Bliss jacket. The ribbing also looks better than my combined style ribbing.

I just got into bed after painstakingly knitting, undoing and reknitting the first two rows of the body of the DB Cabled Jacket (including my first ever cabling experience!). As soon as I lay down I realised I had used the wrong damn needles. I got out of bed, just to make sure and yep, wrong needles. By, oh, 2 sizes. One guess what I will be doing before I shower tomorrow morning?

Last night I cast on the back of the Debbie Bliss Cabled Jacket and knit up the first ball of yarn. This yarn is divine, just luscious, and way more blue knit up that it looked in the ball, which I am very happy about. My only problem? One ball knit up about 3.5 inches of ribbing, I have 21 balls, which seemed like a mountain of yarn and yet I am not sure it will be enough. I think a call to the yarn store is in order.

This morning we all left the house early and we left together. This is a pretty rare occurrence in this house, the only precedent is the daily family outing to the fertility clinic we were doing last month. Today’s outing was much more fun that that! We drove all the way out to Penrith to pick up one of these and this:

I am so excited it’s just silly. Along the way I all but finished the green scarf, this is what I have left to knit:

So tonight I will knit two more rows, cast off the scarf and then immediately cast on for the Debbie Bliss Cabled Jacket. What no swatch? Nope, no swatch, despite using different yarn. This jacket is one size fits all (most?) and I fall exactly in the middle of the size range, which gives me about twelve and a half inches of ease. I am actually hoping that it comes out a bit small (just a tiny bit).