On the needles: Lucy

OK. Here's the thing. I love these two kits from Bees Knees Knits. I showed you the completed Devan sweater last post, and I really love the way it turned out. But here's me with this completion stress and there is that other sweater in sock gauge yarn and I have to go back to work in a week and... Besides, I have been wanted to try out my knitting machine. Well, it has been fun, but I have made tons of mistakes, and the machine has screwed up a few times too. There seems to be a disproportionate amount of time dedicated to correcting mistakes as opposed to the amount of time it takes to knit 60 rows. I suppose that is the price you have to pay.


In any case, each mistake I made has been a learning experience and I now understand my machine a lot better. I would still like to take some lessons to learn all the ins and outs of machine knitting, but I'm happy with the progress I have made so far. Increasing, decreasing, casting off. All are now under my belt. I was going to try to figure out how to do intarsia knitting for the back (there are two different colour blocks on the back), but when I saw how invisible a seam mattress stitch makes, I decided to knit the two back pieces separately and then stitch them together. I will put them back on the machine at the end to do the roll up hem in pink. Finishing by hand will take the same amount of time, but that's ok.



Completed so far: two fronts, one half of the back, and the other half mostly done still on the machine. The sleeves will be a bit trickier as I have to increase every four rows, but it is amazing that, even with all the mistakes, I should have completed all the pieces for this sweater in about 3 days!

Best mistake: After carefully removing a piece of knitting from the machine, pulling back a couple of rows to the mistake, and then painstakingly replacing each stitch on its needle, I realized I had the carriage on the wrong side of the knitting. Well, that's ok, I thought, there's no yarn in the carriage yet, so I will just slide the carriage to the other side and then add the yarn and carry on knitting. I moved the carriage over - and - all the knitting fell off the needles on to the floor!