Monday, January 02, 2017

I knit on, although I did no paper work today. That was not good. I will have to work tax affairs into my mornings, when I've got some oomph. And that's not entirely easy. But I did look in the place in the file where the P60 ought to be – and it’s there! If I’ve got a P60, I can probably wing the rest.

I've reached row 8 of the 86-row border pattern of Mrs Hunter’s shawl. It's a start.

Shandy, why should picking up those stitches be so difficult? Admittedly, you've got an awful lot of them.

I do it from right to left, slipping the needle, from back to front, stitch by stitch into the back loop of each link in the chain edge. That leaves a neat little ridge of the front loops, but that doesn't worry me. The resulting stitches are all backwards -- with their leading edges to the back of the needle. Hence the next instruction, to knit the whole lot tbl thus uncrossimg them. That’s the row I find slow and difficult.

Why does one not slip the needle through the front loop of each link in the chain? I somehow think that would be harder. But the picture on page xxiv of Amedro perhaps suggests that she took a different approach -- I think my stitches sloped in the opposite direction. Maybe she's coming in from the front. Maybe she has eliminated the little ridge thereby. 

But this is all very 20th century thinking. There must be something on YouTube.

I think I have decided to go on with the shawl exclusively at least until I have some sense of how long it is going to take. And maybe I'll just carry straight on until it’s finished.

But what I need to do is choose the next pair of socks. It is very rare that I don’t have a pair of somewhat-knit socks in a bag somewhere, ready for snatching up, but such is the case at the moment. And medical emergencies can come suddenly, and nothing would be worse than a long tedious stretch in a&e without a sock to knit. Yarn, needles: that’s all I need, but I do need them.

Ysolda, too, is sold out of Laine -- the Nordic knitting magazine. Did you find one, Mary Lou?

4 comments:

  1. =Tamar11:01 PM

    I trust that you know what you are doing, but I am slightly confused by what you wrote. Yesterday you said you would knit the row tbl, thus producing a row of crossed stitches. Today you said you would knit the row tbl to uncross the stitches. I think my preference would be to do the fiddly bit in the picking up so as to make the knitting simple, if possible. Regardless, no doubt it will all come right in the end.

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  2. I have not found Laine, unfortunately. Apparently it will be back in stock in several places. Not very many stockists in the US.

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  3. Very good of you to concern yourself with my issue re picking up stitches on Houlland. It's a while since I knitted the edging lace, so I'm not certain that I actually slipped those stitches purlwise - could be that was my first error. It does not specify this in the pattern. I did get them all picked up and began knitting but then I noticed that the wrong side looked much better than the Right side where there was quite a heavy strip. To be honest, I have now reached the point where I can't be sure which is the right side - it's garter stitch. Just one of those projects not meant to be, I suppose.

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    1. I seem to remember quite some discussion about the pickup for Houlland, in either the pattern discussion thread in Kate Davies group on Ravelry, or the haps thread in Jen A-C's group. Might be worth a look, if you haven't already?

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