I’m still fussing with the pattern for this trapezoid. I think I’ve almost got it but I also think I did something when I made the last one and didn’t make a note of it on my pattern. I’ll have a look at it again in the morning. I might have to do some test pieces to work it out and I’ll take photos as I go in case I need to do a tutorial. There’s some potential tricky-to-explain details but nothing that’s difficult to do. Anyway, today’s trapezoid.
My mother is getting remarried in August and while I can’t be there (tickets to Australia are prohibitively expensive), I do want to make something for her. We agreed that I was right in thinking she would like a tablecloth and I chose a few patterns and shared them with her. Now, I am not an inexperienced knitter be even I admitted defeat with the beginning of the pattern. Working with yarn overs on dpn’s is nasty work. I still want to make it because it is a beautiful piece but I’m going to have to wrestle with the pattern until i’m satisfied and I think I just thought of a solution.
The problem is that when you are working in concentric circles you need to divide your stitches between several short needles with points at both end (known as double-point needles, or DPN’s). this in itself is not difficult. Keeping the stitches on your needles, and keeping the tension even is the tricky part. This becomes more complex when the stitch at one end of each dpn is a yarn over (yo)(when you wrap the yarn round the needle but don’t work it through a stitch from the row below). By working through the stitch below, a stitch is tensioned and defined in a particular area. A yarn over does not have this stabiliser and is often a looser and therefore larger stitch. This means that the stitches on the needles around the yarn over can shift in odd ways – becoming looser or having a larger gap between stitches – and therefore the needle isn’t held in place as well. There is little in the knitting world more annoying than preparing to move from one dpn to the next only to discover the blasted needle has slithered it’s way out of the stitches.
If you’re still with me, my point is that I am something of a perfectionist when it comes to my knitting and crochet – particularly when a project is this important to me – and if I can’t get this right, I will be looking for another pattern. I’ve given myself till the end of the week.
After all, you should start as you mean to go on.
I can’t do a series of songs from the age of the musical without including this man. The crush I had on him….. I do love a song and dance man and they don’t get much better than Gene Kelly.
I love how light he is on his feet but my favourite part is where he stops dancing in favour of splashing in the puddles. Well, wouldn’t you?
Some interesting insight into the movie industry at that time in this interview with Gene Kelly.
And just because I love him too, Christopher Walken talking about Gene Kelly along with a multitude of marvellous clips from Gene Kelly’s career.
knit1breathe1 