handy work...

Back to this LK Aran piece that I rediscovered, I was originally going to make a long strip, with diminishing patterning – hence the plain section on one side - and seam it for a simple poncho but as I got into it, the hand transfers were so much fun and so engaging, I changed to making the two-piece poncho. Using an old trick https://knitwords.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-moment-of-truth.html (cutting the desired shape from knit fabric to figure out what size needed), I took the first piece off the machine at 200 rows – it measured 20 inches wide by 28 inches long – and I folded up a piece of knit fabric to that size and pinned the two together to see how it fit. That was the point when I cleaned up and put it away. Getting it out again, I thought I should add about another 8 inches to the length so the new size of each piece would be 20 X 36 inches. After making the hem of the second piece, I decided I should flip the patterning and have the cables beginning from the opposite side – maybe not the best choice but I’ll live with it (if doing again I wouldn’t do that – no real reason, just because…) I had made a cheat sheet with the layout of the cables and what rows they were turned so sort of reversed that on the needle bed and changed it up slightly – a few experiments and a few mistakes here and there but who’s counting? Just having fun, me and Clint Black, killing time! The cabling actually goes pretty quick – it’s those tuck ribs that take

up the time – I found that knitting 30 rows, doing the cables as I went then stopping and doing all the tuck ribs after 30 rows and then taking a break, was the best way to get it done. Got the two sections joined – I
found a diagram in an old Knitwords magazine (#30, Autumn 2004) to help with that. The neck opening is a little large for Autumn in the north, so I made another hem piece to add to it to close it up a bit. This was so much fun, doing all the cabling and not having to follow too many rules to make things matchy-match, I’ll be thinking up another LK hand job!