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Progress

I've made good progress with the afghan, but it wouldn't look very different in a photo. I just have 6 or 7 squares to add, and then the border and darning in the ends. The afghan has taken second fiddle this week to the fair isle waistcoat I started a long time ago.

It's loosely based on the Long Line Fair Isle Slipover by Lesley Stanfield in Debbie Bliss's book Traditional Knitting from the Scottish and Irish Isles. I strongly recommend this book, by the way. It's out of print but not particularly difficult to get hold of or expensive. It has lots of nice fair isle and aran patterns in it.

 

When I was choosing the colours for this I was influenced by some lovely blue persian bowls that I had from my parents' house. I also wanted the pattern and background to be somewhat tweedy - not too stark in contrast. Of course, now that I've come back to the thing I wish I'd done things slightly differently, but now I'm all fired up to get the knitting finished so I can have the fun of cutting the steeks!

Square dance

I've made lots of progress with the crochet squares. The blanket now measures 9 squares by 11, so I have two more rows to do until it's square. Then I will put a border round it. I have enjoyed doing this so much; I love being random and mixing up the colours as much as I can.

The colours are just a little washed out here. The light yellowy-green is actually screaming fluorescent lime! They weren't chosen to be a colour scheme at all (they're mostly leftovers), and I think it shows that if you repeat colours often enough a sort of pattern or scheme emerges and the colours make a pleasing whole, even if some of them clash individually.

I have three quite advanced garment projects that I have let lie for months and months: a Dream in Color Classy top-down cardigan, a tweedy Katherine Hepburn cardigan and a fair isle waistcoat. I wanted to get back to one of them and wasn't sure which it would be. I pictured them in my mind and one of them gave me a little frisson of excitement - the fair isle waistcoat. So, that is back from the UFO miasma. I'm just at the armholes and have got to work out a few things out.

The ice is a bit thicker

The reason I called my last post 'Skating on thin ice' is that I had taken up yet another project/craze: crochet squares (I've also been dabbling with hexagons, but have managed to avert a complete cave-in). I was having a lot of fun making the little squares but couldn't decide on the overall scheme of the thing. After browsing Ravelry and blogs I've decided to abandon the white completely and join the squares as I go. I was having difficulty finding nice but cheap white wool blend dk. It had to be stark white, not cream, to match what I had used previously - and I regard this blanket as a cheap and cheerful scrap blanket, not an investment.   

It's certainly bright, isn't it! My only worry about this method of construction is that the squares are joined by a single chain stitch through the big holes of the adjacent square, and  this thread is simultaneous forming the outer ring of the square you're working with. So if a thread snaps there could be quite a bit of unravelling!

Meantime I am working on a pair of socks (I'm on the toe of the first one, having had to rip it right back to the heel and redo) but all other knitting and spinning seems to be on hold.