What's this? Early last month, Carrie came home for the weekend. We celebrated the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday, but not with traditional foods. We had a lovely pork loin, with parsnips, and rutabaga, and squash. Doug and I have been experimenting with different vegetables and we decided to include Carrie in the festivities. She actually quite liked the rutabaga and squash. We still need to find a nicer way to prepare parsnips. If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.
Since the weather was so nice, we decided to go for a walk in the woods, which is one of Carrie's favourite things to do when home for the weekend. The weather may have been nice, but I still needed these:
Double-knit mittens! Of course, some of you may recognize the yarn from March of 2011; that particular project has been frogged. I still love the design, still love the double knit vest idea. The multi-colour yarn just wasn't working. I had hoped it would give a nice fair-isle look, but it was too busy. I have a selection of single skeins of super-wash wool, so ultimately the vest will be knit. Just not right now.
So if I've given up on the vest, what HAVE I been knitting?
We had a class on mobius cowls at the store for November. Complete with the Lucy Neatby mobious cast-on. Let me tell you, THAT cast on is a brain-twister. My first mobius ended up being twisted twice, which just didn't work. So I had to frog that. Undeterred, I started again.
Success! The cowl is actually long enough that it can wrap around my neck twice, which means that I'll have a lovely warm neck when the winter winds blow. The yarn is our own -- Never Enough Wool sock yarn, dyed by Barb, Sue and myself. I called the colour "Chocolate-covered Orange." The design is from Knitscene Accessories, and is called "Roam Cowl." I quite like both the design and the wool.
Since I had managed to mess up my first mobious attempt, I HAD to try again. This is a Lucy Neatby design that I found on Ravelry. I used two skeins of Patons Shetland Chunky and a 6.0mm needle. Of course, I looked at the instructions and thought that the cowl would be too small and added 10 extra stitches. Once finished, I find that the smaller number of stitches would have been better. The cowl isn't long enough to wrap twice, and too long to wrap once.
Also, the peculiar construction of a mobious means that the right side is also the wrong side, and this specific design has a definite right and wrong side. And again, due to the peculiarity of the mobious, both sides can and do show. I won't be doing this one again, that's for certain.
And then, much to my horror and disgrace, I discovered that I had assisted one of our students to create a double twist in HER mobious. In penance, I decided that I should knot yet another mobious just to be sure that I could visually assure the cast on and first row were done correctly.
This cowl was also found on Ravelry. It's very simple, actually. A section of knit-side facing, an eyelet row, more knit-side facing. Then some purl-side facing, an eyelet row, more purl side facing. And a cast off. The picture doesn't really show how wide this cowl is. One could wear this as a shawl, or shoulder-warmer if desired, or even wrap around the neck one more time. Plenty of room.
Interestingly, I cast on 160 stitches for my first mobious, and 170 for this green one. If you tip your head, you can see that there is a huge difference in length between the two scarves. Far more than 20 stitches. Why is that, I wondered.
And then I remembered. The orange cowl has a regular cast off, done as loosely as I could. I didn't have enough yarn to actually finish the seventh row of the pattern, so had to go back to row 6 and then cast off. Didn't have enough to work the stretchy cast-off. The green cowl had plenty of yarn. So I was able to work the requisite stretch cast-off -- knit two stitches, then knit through the front of them, leaving one stitch on the right-hand needle; lather, rinse, repeat. Big difference between the regular and the stretchy cast-off. Lesson learned!
