1. Washed and blocked the Featherweight Cardigan, with the help of the cat and the kid. Managed to not get a single photo of it after it came off the blocking board. Smart, I know.
2. Took my Borders rewards AND a coupon, went to Borders at Columbus Circle and got these two books:
The first book is the precursor to Knitters Book of Wool, which I bought and love. I have many questions about yarn after reading the book of wool, so hopefully this will answer most of them.
3. From Continuous Cables, I learned why my ribbing got so crappy over the last year, and a quick little technique for fixing it. When I first started knitting I was doing so combination style, purling English and knitting Continental. When you're knitting ribbing, or cabling, a good way to keep your leftmost stitch on either the rib or the cable from being sloppy and loose is to knit through the back loop and then untwist the stitch when you're purling back through that section. Which is exactly what I was doing when I was knitting combination style.
Now that I'm knitting in fully English style, I'm having problems. Go figure.
4. I spent a goodly amount of time knitting here yesterday:
We needed sunshine, warmth and greenery, so we headed over to the New York Botanical Gardens (i.e. our backyard) and just sat in the sunshine in the conservatory (glass house) in the lovely 75 degree interior. That is also perfectly humid, which was totally necessary for our poor sinuses.5. After trying to knit on Bruce's sweater again and failing, I finally just re-charted the entire cable section so that I could look at the entire pattern visually, and put in helpful directional arrows and stuff. This worked! I'm now almost to the top of the sweater, which is awesome.
There are a few other items (like my homework from the sweater design class and a couple of yarn/pattern disastrous match-ups) but I'll save those for another post.
All in all, a busy and productive weekend.
Off to work...
I've got a Border voucher too and I really should go looking for a knitting or embroidery book. I like your choices and I'm going to look for them tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteI would really love to have a place like that to knit in these days! Even if it is a great and sunny day here today - it is snow EVERYWHERE!!!!
ReplyDeleteOk - I am not mad - just frustrated :-) And fed up with shuffeling snow :-)
ReplyDeleteYes it really makes a huge difference. Most of December we don't have daylight at all, now the sunset is around 4pm.
ReplyDeleteHow cool is that to go to the gardens to escape the winter weather?? Bet that place is full of people all the time!!
ReplyDeleteAnd on a non-knitting note...of course, that is no surprise coming from me, heh.....
WHO DAT?? DAT WOULD BE LOOSIANA SAINTS, DAT'S WHO!!!!!!
Very cool - I have Leapman's book Cables Untangled, but not the other one (yet).
ReplyDeleteOh, I love the botanical gardens! I've only been to New York City once though. Boo. It must have been wonderful to sit among so much lush greenery and just...knit.
ReplyDeleteSo, the Botanical Gardens? Really, really envious of you. Really.
ReplyDeleteI love the Book of Yarn! It's such a great resource, and the patterns are really knittable (is that a word) so you don't feel like you dropped a bunch of money for a bit of text and crap patterns! Yay!