Chaos...... and then

Guess what we are doing this Easter Break...

 

 

 

 

And yes we are not finished yet, there will be still some wall papering to do and putting the last pieces of wood back where they belong, 

Straighforward

 

Some years ago I always had a sock on the needles. At that time I used to have about three parallel projects and one of those was socks. But at sometime I started to knit more and more 1 item at a time and socks kind of disappeared from what I knitted. On the on the one hand, the socks I knitted were appreciated, by big daughter, husband and myself (smaller daughter wore them but was never a huge fan), but as I do like to knit sweaters more, once I knitted one item at a time, they got the lowest priority. Now most of the socks I knitted got holes and I am really not very good with repairing holes in socks…so most of them had their natural lifetime and that was that...

I do however still have a considerable sock-yarn stash. I have delved into that for shawl knitting, but not really for sock knitting. And then some weeks ago at a local lys in Malmö, I spotted some Zauberball Crazy and just had to buy it. And for once I put sock knitting back on my things to make. So some simple, but nice socks…and as I remembered excellent for commute knitting…..

Warm and Comfy

It doesn’t happen that much, but I knitted something out of season….  But to counter I made it big and it will be all right for some winters to come. And on a rainy spring morning it still is warm and comfy…..

Experimenting

Earlier this year, I made M a small dress using Barbara Walker’s continuos set-in sleeve approach and it was clear to me that I needed to experiment even more with this approach. It is a bit fiddly to start with as you basically knit the shoulder shaping first in bits and pieces using short rows and picking up stitches, but once the shoulders are in place and stitches are picked up for the top of the sleeve cap, the sleeve are knitted continuos with the main body. I like this more then the contiguous method which has come about the last couple of years ago, as there the shoulder shaping is very steep and the sleeve caps can be very pointy. I come from a family with “swimmer” shoulders, straight and square, and just like raglan not being my best friend, contiguous isn’t either. I think it works really well with a saddle shoulder but not so well otherwise. I think what I mean can be best seen from the two projects below

Contiguous, too pointy for my taste….

 

Contiguous, saddle approach, nice shoulder….

 

So now continuous does have the disadvantage that there are a quite a number of threads that need to be weaved in as the shoulders are knitted in bits and pieces, but after that, it works really nice and neat. I do like the short row approach for set-in sleeves, but I do think that for patterns, in this case stripes, this method is really very very neat….

 

And the yarn, it is Quince & Co Owl tweet, a rustic wool-alpaca blend. Way  too warm for spring knitting, but oh so comfy for just any time of the year knitting….