Snippets

A knitting friend gave me the cutest card...

Inside it says ‘I walk the line. ~ Johnny Cash’

I laughed and laughed!

Here is a portion of the sleeve on the hoodie I told you about the other day. This motif is repeated vertically up the sleeves and in the centre of the front, but on the front the holes are not all cut out, I guess, because of the zipper.

Now, to get this look with knitting, I had been mulling over different ideas. My first thought was to make the large diamond opening in 2 sections by holding one side, and knit the first side, decreasing and then increasing the centre edge. Then, place that side in hold and repeat on the other side. But what would happen in the centre? I didn’t want to do a lot of messing about and definitely no sewing - I would like the centre to be sort of filled in loosely somehow. So, my next thought was to shape both sides of the diamond opening at the same time and, to get long-enough-to-do-something-with strings in the centre, leave the empty needles in work each row, but drop the loops before knitting the next row. Then when I began to close up the diamond somehow latch up the strings to fill in the centre. Here’s what I got:

Problems to correct or overcome: somehow stabilize the inside end stitches of the diamond opening - either using some of the existing strings to e-wrap or use another piece of yarn.

I had 11 empty needles at the centre of the diamond so I only reformed 3 columns of stitches, doubling the yarn in this part - maybe change that into seed stitch? And, make the diamond bigger, of course - this was just a let’s-see-what-happens? swatch.

Make the shaping of the diamond opening more interesting - maybe make a mini cable in the travelling stitches, like the detail in the raglan shaping of ‘ReddyWare’ (February Serial Stuff for mid gauge) or ‘Crosswise’ (No 48).

  

My young nephew was over last night - he’s admittedly somewhat of a geek and he was showing me a little gadget that was the Blackberry version of the ipad (I think) that he was setting up for a local businessman. Without thinking it through, I impulsively asked him for some help or suggestions with email and address book stuff because I wanted to know if I could have several and separate address books to send out emails only to certain people. He went into my office and he laughed and he laughed. Apparently my office computer is a little out of date - I have a 12 inch monitor and my operating system is Windows 2000 - he laughed some more! He tried to convince me that I needed to upgrade. As he left, he said, 'don't pay me too much attention, I'm just a whippersnapper’ - I think that was a low blow!