Well, I've finished the body of Tempting! I finished it a week ago, but can't start the sleeves yet. But here is a progress picture!
Apologies for the rather bright flash. It's quite hard to accurately capture the colour of the wool - not as turquoise as it is in this pic with the flash, but without a flash is far too dark. And in some lights it really looks sea-green!
Talking of green, I bought a few balls of green yarn today:
On Wednesday I saw an advert in the paper, that House of Fraser were opening a haberdashery department in Birmingham on Thursday 10th, and there would be 25% off for the first 100 customers with a copy of the advert. And guess where I was going to be on the morning of the 10th? That's right! So when I arrived in Brum I went to HoF, wandered round trying to find the haberdashery for ages. When I finally discovered it it wasn't really that impressive, so I just left. Then later I was talking to a friend and discovered that there are
two House of Frasers
on the very same road! Doh! So today I was able to go to the other one (even though the discount was no longer valid), because I wanted to look for frogs for poor old Sonnet... I still can't find any, not even black ones. I've now bought some giant press-studs so that I can do it up and maybe start wearing it, but ideally I want the frogs as well.
Anyway, this haberdashery department took me even longer to find than the last. I went up and down the lifts and escalators about 4 times, asked 3 different people... When I finally found it it wasn't that special. But I decided to have a good look anyway. I had taken a couple of notes from patterns I'd like to make up, one is
Blackberry from this month's Knitty. It uses 6-7 balls of Rowan Chunky Print, and while they did have this wool in the shop, they didn't have any nice colours, and it was over £7 a ball! So I looked for substitutions... there was some Jaegar Fleece, but that was even more expensive, and less yardage per ball! Yikes. There was some nice, soft yarn which was cheaper, but it was a patterning yarn, and what with Sonnet I don't want another multi-coloured cardigan. I was beginning to feel I'd have to leave empty-handed, when I noticed this beautiful moss green double knitting yarn. I realised that if I hold 2 strands together I should get the right gauge, and it's only £1.29 per ball - hoorah! Of course, it's cheapy acrylic, but there's no way I can afford £30-£50 for the wool to make a cardigan with. I got 9 balls (all they had), and spent £11.61. I think this should be enough. Irritatingly the ball doesn't state the yardage, but a similar sized ball from a different company said it had over 200yds/m, so I should be OK.
This green should look awesome with my hair, I've been wanting to make a green top for a while:
I have to say I don't think I'll be visiting that department store again though, if I'm going to buy full-price yarn I may as well go to a local independent shop. Plus, while the women working there were very helpful and nice to me, they were bitching really loudly about a customer! The customer had left, and does sound like an awkward case, but they were completely unprofessional to talk like that with me in the shop.
Anyway, I probably won't start Blackberry for a while, but it's there if I get bored. I need to learn how to do cables though!
Before I start Blackberry I thought I could knit scarves for my siblings for Yule, and have decided to try the Alien Illusion Scarf in Stitch'n'Bitch. I just grabbed whatever wool (yeah yeah
yarn) I had, and started following the chart. I like it, so I think I'll continue with this, and maybe get some other illusion designs for the other scarves.
Now you don't see it...
Now you do!
Cool, huh?!
Labels: AlienIllusionScarf, Blackberry, Sonnet, Tempting
