Knitting

I've been knitting away and have fallen in love with Rowan Big Wool, which is 100% merino wool. And which has led to me blowing my budget for the month on buying enough of it to make myself a jumper. I had my first of five "Make a Sweater" classes yesterday evening and spent the entire time swatching. I was very pleased to learn how to do this properly though and, as I knit even more loosely than I thought, glad I took the time to do it. I'm knitting a jumper which has a sideways pattern i.e. you start at one sleeve and knit the length of that, increase once you get to the body and knit the body and then decrease when you get across to the other sleeve and knit that. It's a pattern from a book my sister brought home from the States for me last year called Hot Knits. I chose a pattern made with Big Wool as I think it should knit up quite quickly and so I'll hopefully be making good progress before I start to get frustrated. Although as I need to go down three needle sizes from what's recommended to get gauge it's going to be a bit slower than I thought. I'm ignoring minor points like the fact that I left it late to get the wool and wasn't able to get all 14 balls from the same dyelot.

I also finished my tea cosy last week and have sent it off to my swap partner in Australia. I had a lot of fun doing that as I didn't use any of the patterns available free online but instead made my own up. It was essentially the same hat pattern that I've made several times before but doubled in size. This involved a half-an-hour or so with a calculator to figure out the shaping part of it and what I ended up with was HUGE but as it was being felted that was okay. I'm not going to post photos until my swap partner receives it just in case she sees it here.