Isabelle’s butterflies are done, so tomorrow I can cast on those fronts!

I cast off “sleeve a”, added the two missing rows to “sleeve b” and cast that off too and look, they match!

That really is two sleeves, just in case you were wondering where “sleeve b” had run off to. When I saw that they matched and no ripping was required I was so excited I put the jigsaw together and look, it’s jacket shaped.

All it needs now is some fronts and a seaming party. There will be no more knitting for me tonight as I am breaking out the sewing machine and going to work on a quilt I am making for Isabelle, I am hoping to have it done for christmas. If I get all the butterflies top stitched tonight it will be quite a milestone for me and I won’t be able to do anymore quilting until I have bought the next round of fabric so I will be casting on the baby hoody fronts tomorrow night I expect. I hope to be done with this project by the weekend ’cause that Lamb’s Pride is whispering to me, can you hear it? “Booga Bag, booga bag….”

It seems I somehow got my two sleeves out of sync after the third increase and “sleeve b” is now two rows shorter than “sleeve a”. Oops. I am going to add in the missing two rows at the end I think, the difference is very small as far as I can see so far. Given I am about to cast off “sleeve a” and then add those missing two rows to “sleeve b” it’s almost no extra work to do before deciding if ripping back is really necessary.

Photos tomorrow when I have made a decision one way or another and have something to show for it…

I seem to be running a day behind here… yesterday’s news is that I took the two untouched balls I had left over from the Big Bad Baby Blanket back to the shop to swap them for a different colour. I had 1.5 balls each of the Alabaster and Ricepaper left and a single ball of the Quartz, a little over 4 balls in total. Unfortunately the Quartz ball had been partially pulled out and re-wound so it couldn’t be returned. My plan was to swap the two paler balls that I could return for two more balls of Quartz and then make a baby sweater, moslty purple with a stripe of the two paler colours somewhere along the way. That was the plan… Then I saw this:

You may notice that there are actually three balls there, I couldn’t help myself, I bought an extra ball. Now that I have had some time to sleep on it I have a new plan. My one ball of quartz and the leftovers of Ricepaper and Alabaster Silkroad Aran are going to become hat to go with the BBBB, I dont’ really want to do another large project with the same yarn/colours right now. Of course that frees me up to do something all new with the lovely new “Boheme” yarn. As it happens it is a very good thing that I have a new plan because this yarn is NOT Aran Tweed as both the shopkeeper and I thought it was, but DK Tweed which would not have knitted up nearly so well with my Silk Road Aran remnants. Finding that the new yarn was DK weight was very pleasing all round, not only did it help enable this new plan for the remnants of my BBBB, it is also much better suited to a cardigan for Isabelle. Needless to say the yarn store is holding another 4 balls for me to go pick up at my earliest convenience.

Oh and I do have some news from today after all. A pair of 6.5mm Crystal Palace circs came in the post today so now I am ready to start working on the Booga Bag the second the Phildar Hooded Jacket is done. Wonder if that will be enough motivation to see me knock of the rest of the sleeves and the fronts this weekend, so far it has been a very quick knit.

I cast on the sleeves for the Red Phildar Hooded Jacket yesterday, while Isabelle was playing the fountain at the Centennial Park Cafe on a 39 degree day. Apparently the hottest October day on record in Sydney with the runner up some time in the 1940’s.

Knitting in the shade while Isabelle played so happily was lovely and I expect there will be more of it to come as the days where water play is an absolute requirement increase in frequency. The only real problem with yesterdays splashing and knitting excursion was the sun block. I had not yet bought Isabelle outdoor swimmers to replace the ones she outgrew last summer. I had to sun block all the bits that stuck out of her clothes before we left home and then smear on even more once she was getting her swimmers on. I hate sun block at the best of times but it is impossible to get it completely off your hands without multiple soapings which just isn’t possible in a public park and that made for some knitting frustration. In the end I had to change how I hold the yarn to compensate and off I went.

Happily for me Isabelle now has a new super cute neck to wrist rashy and a matching swim hat and shorts. Which means she is better protected and I don’t have to get the sunblock out after leaving home. Woohoo!

As for the sleeves, they are coming along nicely after yesterday’s effort and some car knitting this afternoon.

It’s a hood:

This is my second attempt at Maggie Righetti’s three needle bind off and seam process. It worked really well the first time, and gave such a lovely neat seam that it was quite distressing how hard it was to seam the last little bit of the join that had to be done with a needle where the decreases were.

When I was done I was at first pleased, but also a bit puzzled as to why the rows looked so wide apart at the seam. As I lay in bed trying to sleep last night I realised that the rows were so far apart because I cast off on what would have been a right side row. While waiting for an hour or so at the doctors today I ripped out the bind off and the previous row and then bound off again. I am much happier with this version.

The last bit of the seam (which was sewn over the increases) seems to look better binding off a row earlier too, but is still not ideal. I am not sure if I fully understand short rows, but if my understanding is correct then I probably would have been better off using short rows rather than decreases and then seaming the whole hood with the three needle bind off. But it is done now and I am not undoing it again; however, I will know next time I make a hood in this style.

The first piece of my first sweater is complete:

I have decided to try out Maggie Righetti’s method for binding off and seaming two pieces together at the same time - so the shoulders are on stitch holders until I have finished the fronts and I will then bind off the front and back shoulders at the same time. I have finished knitting the hood too and tonight I am going to bind and seam this in the same way as the shoulders will be done. I can’t wait to see how it will go….

One of my more exciting moments today was the arrival of this pacel:

Unfortunately I can’t open it because it contains the yarn and pattern for Carla - Isabelle’s christmas present present to me. I am waiting for Jesse to open it and fish out the All Seasons Cotton I ordered for Kate because I want that RIGHT NOW.

I was surprised and delighted to find that my replacement Addi’s had arrived already when I checked the post today. With Robyn still here I was able to knit while she and Isabelle played together at the Magic Yellow Bus.

I also got some more knitting time in during the car ride home after dropping Robyn at the airport and fetching Jesse from work. The good news is the armholes were shaped stress free:

The bad news is that these new needles were much better the the ones I returned but they still had one join with a rough spot which caught the yarn every time I pulled it across the join on that side. I just want to get on with my knitting so I got out my nail file and now it’s perfect. I really must follow Maggie Righetti’s advice and buy nail file for my knitting bag.

No, not exciting new needles. Sadly yesterday’s efforts in the car confirmed my fear that my new addi 5.5mms were not quite right. So today I wrapped them in bubble wrap and shipped them back. There will be no shaping of any armholes until the replacements arrive, probably on thursday.

Even if I did have my knitting on neeldes instead of stitch holders I would probably not be knitting tonight anwyay as my glands are doing very bad things and I rather expect I will be in bed not long after Isabelle.

I feel like I haven’t been doing a lot of knitting the last week, it seems like I have been constantly busy with something else but I made up for it today in the car. Jesse’s mother, Robyn, is in town and after spending the first two days of the weekend taking Isabelle out without me, so I could work, we all went for a day trip together. Hours and hours in the car made for good hooded jacket progress.

Isabelle thought all this knitting was very dull and she slept through it.

Jesse and Robyn were too interested in the scenery to pay attention to my knitting.

We had a great day - and it wasn’t just because i finally got to do some knitting.

Even with all that fun I did indeed make a lot of progress on the jacket - partly because Jesse, the designated driver, let me have a light on so I could keep knitting after darkness fell. In fact I made so much progress I had to stop knitting and wait to get home and get out my books. I am about to shape my very first armholes and I need to decide a) whether to bind off or hold live stitches and use them for seaming later, and b) if I bind off whether to bind off both sides on the same row and therefore rejoin yarn to keep going, or to bind off over two rows so I can keep using the same yarn. I hope to have this question (or two) resolved by tomorrow night. In the mean time here it is waiting for armhole shaping: