Getting somewhere slowly

At least a year after starting this baby, I have finished most of the knitting on the big crazy denim cardigan. I have to sew some ends in, do a buttonband (okay, so look for that in another year or so...), throw it in the wash to shrink it, attach the sleeves, sew a few seams, find buttons. Yikes.

Here are some of my favourite bits.


You may have seen this before. It is a knit-and-purl combo from Barbara Walker's Learn to Knit Afghan book. I love the way it looks! One day I'll make something bigger than 6 inches out of it!



This is, I think, the pattern used for Cookie A's Monkey socks, but I got it from Jan Eaton's 200 Knitted Blocks.


Zigzag seed stitch, so cool! I bought myself the 2010 Vogue Knitting calendar, which has a stitch pattern almost every day (Saturday and Sunday are combined). It is sort of useless as a calendar, but fine as a swatch library, with lace, cables and just neat textures.



The cause of much moaning and groaning! This is the emblem from Alice Starmore's Sigil (on Ravelry). I'm not sure it was a good choice to use with the denim yarn -- won't things get all squished when it shrinks in length? That centre bit is quite dense! It was great fun decreasing from 7 stitches to 1 at the top of the loops, but some rows of the chart also took me a couple of tries to get right.

When I last mentioned this cardigan, I showed you the 1.5 fronts, and said, "I'm thinking of simplifying life by making the back rather... simpler... than the fronts." Well, there go those good plans, out the window again!

Here's the front, and those simple single-coloured sleeves:

And here's most of the back -- minus just a couple of inches. Excuse the cable needle stuck in there!


As you can see, my inspiration went from the simplicity of Narvik (Ravelry link) to the chaos of the Gwithian Blanket. (I looked for an online image of that lovely thing, but the best I came up with is Kay's post about it, on Mason-Dixon Knitting.)

I am happy to know I have actually made great progress on this, and am learning once again the Big Rule: if you work on it, it will get done, and if you don't, it won't. I shall continue to plug along.




Have you ever seen such a hot pink and orange combo!? Just lookie at that! Hoo-ee!