ZimmerZipper

The attempt at Avast will have to wait. I've abandoned that idea and have embraced the idea of doing a zippered cardigan using Elizabeth Zimmerman's percentage system as outlined in her book, Knitting Without Tears.

The basic idea is that you knit up a swatch on a pair of needles (duh!), figure out the gauge (in this case, 3.75 stitches per inch), figure out how big around the sweater needs to be (in this case -- big -- 50"). Then multiply to get the number of stitches to cast on (188), plus five stitches for a steek to be cut later -- a total of 193 stitches. After that, things get weird. It's basically like knitting a story problem. Ms. Zimmerman has quite a free-form approach to direction writing. If two needles are travelling toward each other at 45 mph....

Anyway, this picture shows the results so far. I did 12 rows of 2x2 ribbing, and now it's just knit knit knit until I hit the pits. I'm still on the first ball of yarn and I'm getting quite a lot of fabric out of it. We'll see. I've fooled myself before.

Thanks to Caro at the meetup group for walking me through the idea. It gave me quite a boost of confidence about the whole idea.

Other project updates:

I got the first Bomb Pop sock done, but felt it was a little short for my foot. I really thought I'd used to much yarn already, but when I weighed the sock against the yarn I had left, I realized I could afford to make this sock really fit. So I've ripped back down and have to retackle it.

I also washed the acrylic Sherbet Baby Blanket before sending it out to the new little one for whom it's intended, and it pilled like crazy. I washed it on the gentlest cycle and dried it on really low heat. I'm think the extra tumbling because of the length of drying time might have been the reason for this?