Joined

It’s been a weird knitting week. I’ve grabbed some time here in there, getting a bit of progress done on the Christmas Balls, and even more on the Men’s Sweater.

Up to this point, I’ve been knitting flat. With eight stitches added every other row, the growth in width is rapid. After a foot or so, the instructions tell you to join the two halves together and continued knitting in the round. Yay! This means I don’t have to do nearly as much purling. I’m a much slower at purling than knitting, so I’m already making great progress. In fact, soon, I should be getting to the point where the sleeves happen. So far, I’ve been through three balls – it feels like I’m really tearing through the yarn on this project. I suppose I’m unfairly comparing it to the Christmas Balls, where it looks like I’ve barely made a dent in the yarn.

    

I finished up two more balls this week, finishing the chapter on Children’s mittens. The one on the left is called, simply, Mitten. It was the first ball in which the pattern color crept to close the cast-on and bind-off ends. The second, Dovre, is based on a motif common in Norwegian knitting, and was inspired by a jacket worn by one of the authors’ grandfather. I liked it because there weren’t any long floats, and every fourth row was solid white.

I’m on hold for a bit with the Christmas Balls right now. I’ve caught up to mid-February on my schedule. I was trying to strike while the iron was hot, but the next pattern is a tri-color one, and I didn’t have any suitable color to go with it. Some green yarn is on order, and I’ll pick up again when it arrives. In the meantime, I’m going to try and make us much progress as I can on the sweater. And speaking of sweaters, I wore my Vaila Slipover today, and it made me very happy. I’m thinking of knitting  another one from The Art of Fair Isle Knitting. I’m going to take a look at some yarn options right now…