WIN STUFF!

In a shameless and frankly rather needy bid to attract more comments on this blog, I hereby announce the UPP’s first competition. The prize is this knitted scarf:

Perfect should you ever need to camouflage yourself amid a flock of parrots.

It's about 12 centimetres wide and 1.5 metres long. For those who like a craft spec, the stitch is 1 x 1 rib on 4.5 mm needles and the yarn is Noro Silk Garden, a wool/silk blend. I had a fascination with this yarn for about two years, knitting my way through a couple of hundred dollars' worth and finishing up with a whole bunch of ball ends. Thriftily, I decided to meld them into a scarf. Now I offer it to you, dear readers.

To enter the competition, check out the rules on the WIN STUFF page (top right) and post a comment there.

It's a modest prize, reflecting the youth of this blog and the number of people who seem to be reading it, but look on the bright side: your chances of winning will probably be quite high!

The one I've been dreading

Monday night: home alone, washing up done and put away, house tidied, nothing on the telly – and I realised that, short of doing my tax return, I'd run out of excuses to keep avoiding the Unfinished Projects. 

Bugger.

So I fetched out the red jumper that I started long ago for one of Melbourne's needy. It's the project I've been dreading the most as a) I don't much like it, b) I knew it was going to need quite a lot of calculations and cogitations to work out where I was up to and what else needed to be done, and numbers give me brain strain; and c) I've learnt a lot about knitting in the eight years or so since I started it and I'm not happy with how I've done certain parts of it. Knitting in the round on circular needles, for example – what a good idea that is! No need to do row after row of purl if you're making stocking stitch – just lots and lots of lovely knit stitches, with the bonus of minimal sewing up once you've finished all the pieces. 

But I digress. All that is beside the point, which is finishing stuff no matter how I feel about it.

So I counted rows and analysed the scribbles I'd made on the pattern, and once again wondered just why I'd abandoned it precisely where I had, until I remembered that after a hiatus in the project long ago I'd recommenced and knitted the entire back, only to realise I'd done it on larger needles than the front. So I had to rip it all back and start again. Yep, that would have discouraged me.

Nonetheless I did manage to redo a goodly amount of it before giving up again. In fact once I'd done my calculations tonight I realised I'd knitted about twenty rows too many – another thing to blame on my number blindness. So I ripped those back too then got down to the real task of shaping the front neck.

In real life it's a cheerful cherry red, not this retina-shredding shade of orange.

Despite the pattern being fairly basic – knit 8, purl 2 on right-side rows and purl every stitch on wrong-side rows – I've been finding it quite easy to go wrong, by doing my usual trick of musing vaguely on irrelevant things rather than paying attention. However, despite my not liking the jumper very much, the yarn (Patons Zhivago, for those who like such specs) is pleasantly soft to knit with. So now that one shoulder is well on its way, I feel justified in calling it quits for tonight. I've got craft group on Wednesday, so I will attack it again then.