Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Groundhog Day

…and the weather forecast for Britain which I heard just now said cloudy, cloudy, cloudy for the whole island, bottom to top. On the other hand, the current fierce American weather is ominous – so often it crosses the Atlantic and turns up here in 10 days’ time.

Janet, I am flattered that you should ask about the pattern for the rugby-shirt sweaters. I generated it myself with Sweater Wizard. I can’t remember whether the pattern offered the collar and the placket fastening at the neck – I think I got them out of “Vogue Knitting”. That book is very useful for such details, but the other design books probably are just about as good.

And speaking of Vogue – the very first VKB is coming up on eBay. I tried to copy the item number for you, but only succeeded in messing up my formatting. It’s listed as “Vogue’s Book of Knitting & Crochet Patterns 1920/30s” and the seller clearly has no idea what she’s got. Since I started to keep vague track in 2006, it’s come up twice before now. One, of course, is now mine. The other time some foolish soul offered it together with Nos 2 & 3. She got a three-figure sum, but she’d have done better selling them separately.

Mine came from a charity. I like to think that someone donated it to one of their shops, and someone there had the wit to see that it deserved a place on eBay.

I’ll watch this one, out of interest.

Rustling about in the stash cupboard yesterday I found another skein of my greenery-yallery yarn (already wound!) – so now I’m really pretty sure I have enough to make the sleeves green. I’m getting on nicely with the bottom mitered square at the back – I should move on today to the straight bit.

The fun thing there will be joining it to the straight part of the front as I proceed – this is billed as a no-sew pattern. At the moment the whole thing is like a misshapen scarf; that should give it some structure.

Sarah, the stripes in the now-unwanted sleeve were self-generating. The yarn is Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in Annie Modesitt’s “Roadside Gerry” colourway. (They did a series of yarns designed by famous bloggers.) The stripes just happened. I wonder if that many stitches would produce similar stripes from the other yarns in the series?

It’s good to have the Curmudgeon blogging again. It sounds from her account and others as if Vogue Live! was a thorough success.

6 comments:

  1. There is quite a lot of clear blue sky over this far corner of Norfolk at the moment, and we are promised "sunny intervals" for later. I am just waiting for the frost to melt before taking my bike out for the first time in far too long.

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  2. The sun has just come out in Lincolnshire.

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  3. For once the giant storm has missed us here in Minnesota - Happy Groundhog, Imbolc, Middle of Winter it's onto spring from here. It is supposed to be in the single digits here today (F), so I hope that means sun.

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  4. I can see clouds here - the outermost clouds from cyclone Yasi which hit land 1000s km away!

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  5. It never got above freezing here in South Texas, something that almost never happens. Now they are saying it might snow tomorrow. And the utility companies in Texas were unable to deal with power demand- we had rolling blackouts all day- three while I was on campus. One right in the middle of a class. I managed to keep the class going for another 30 minutes, but the cold (the heater went off) was so bad that the kids were sitting in coats and hats shivering and then I finally let them go... Its been a miserable, long, day. The windchill is around 5 F here. That's Oberlin weather, not Texas weather!

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  6. =Tamar12:33 AM

    So far so good, here, with regard to weather. How many stitches are in the sleeves, to make Lorna's Laces make relatively even stripes?

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