The weather took a cold turn, so I got some knitting done last night. I finished the left front of the cardigan! Woo-hoo. It looks excessively long for some reason, but it measures exactly what I wanted it to - 2" longer than my current sweater, because the current sweater is a little too short for me. I think a combination of pinning it out wonky, the angle of the picture, and the fact that it's laying flat on a bed instead of being worn makes it look worse than it is.
The good news is, my scheme worked. When I started the front, I had 13 too many stitches for my pattern repeat, but I needed them all to have the right width. So I decided to do a strip of plain stockinette up each side - 7 stitches on the arm side, and 6 on the buttonband side. I really liked the way it was turning out, framing the pattern. Then when I got to the v-neck, I realized I was going to lose those if I just did the decreases as directed, and I didn't think I'd like that nice framing strip of stockinette just disappearing up the neck.
So I did my decreases on the edge, but then moved one stockinette stitch in on each decrease row, replacing a pattern stitch with the plain stitch. That maintained the six-stitch stockinette border. I didn't know how well that was going to work, if it would look the way I hoped, until I tried it. But I'm really happy with it.
The one thing that didn't turn out as planned is the shoulder.
It's actually straight in real life, I just pinned it out poorly. But I wanted to add another 1" wide strip of stockinette at the top, before binding off the shoulder. I thought that would make a nice frame all the way around, and would make a nice shoulder seam - with stockinette on both sides, there would be no weird pattern juxtaposition at the shoulder seam. However, when I finished the neck decreases, the directions said to work even until the piece measured so many inches from the armhole marker, and it turned out it already measured that, right then. Not having anticipated that, I didn't work the last inch in stockinette; didn't want to rip it out and do it over; and didn't want to add an inch more to the length. So ... the front ends at the shoulder seam like you see.
I actually don't think this is much of a disaster, though ... it actually ended right at the end of a pattern repeat, so it looks okay (and had I done the 1" strip of stockinette, it would have ended somewhere in the middle of the pattern repeat, which I don't think would have looked as nice). My decision now is whether to do the back the same way, and just have the two pattern edges come together there, which probably wouldn't look so bad, with one set of leaves merging right at their mid-point, and the other set being point to point.
Or go ahead and add my stockinette strip on the back (since now I will know when I'm getting to it), and then have pattern on the front of the shoulder and just stockinette on the back. If I did that, I'd probably make the stockinette strip on the back wider, like kind of a mini-yoke, instead of just a one inch strip.
I'll have to put some more thought to that. And take into consideration how I want the top of the sleeves to look too. Wow - this designing thing is fun!
In gardening news: this was the other project I mentioned last weekend, that I didn't post pictures of because it wasn't done yet. It's still not technically 'done,' but ... here it is.
This was Greg's brainchild, built from scrap parts from his job that otherwise would have been thrown out. The bottom is a beacon light casing, now with a regular colored light bulb wired into a photocell that automatically turns it on near dusk, and off in the morning. The top is some type of plastic dish thing, I forget what it was originally for. It was white, Greg spray-painted the inside silver, and the outside green with a leaf pattern, made by placing leaves from a tree on the bowl, then spray-painting over them. I forgot to take pictures of that, though. The pagoda was mine - it is actually a cast iron tealight candle holder.
I'm still pondering how I feel about this. On the one hand, I like it in theory, and I'm generally perfectly okay with having unique things in the garden that one wouldn't otherwise necessarily consider 'garden stuff.' I like having a waterfall, and I have abandoned trying to build one from rocks - tried that, not going to work with this pond. For one reason, the space behind the pond is too cramped to work in, to build it right; and for two things, it's just too much of an enormous pain in the butt for me.
This looks quite intriguing at night, with the subtle light of the purple party bulb lighting up the rippling surface of the pond and the near surroundings.
But to be perfectly honest, the large amount of plastic is just bugging me. It just seems so incongruous. The bottom part seems overly large to me, too - out of scale with the rest of the stuff in that area. I've tried to figure out a way to camouflage it while still allowing the glow from the light to show, but I haven't thought of anything yet - there's no room anywhere near it to plant something to grow in front of it, it's hanging right out over the edge of the pond.
I am going to ponder it over the next week or two, giving it a fair chance to settle in, and see how I feel then. It may just be that I'm not used to it yet.
If I do decide I can't adjust to it in the pond garden, it won't be scrapped entirely ... I would like to use the components somewhere else in the yard. Whether as a waterfall, I don't know ... it depends on whether we put in another water feature. We could move the light somewhere else, and keep the silver dish, just mounting it on something else. We can find other lighting options, I'm sure.
Well. It will bear some thinking on.
The good news is, my scheme worked. When I started the front, I had 13 too many stitches for my pattern repeat, but I needed them all to have the right width. So I decided to do a strip of plain stockinette up each side - 7 stitches on the arm side, and 6 on the buttonband side. I really liked the way it was turning out, framing the pattern. Then when I got to the v-neck, I realized I was going to lose those if I just did the decreases as directed, and I didn't think I'd like that nice framing strip of stockinette just disappearing up the neck.
So I did my decreases on the edge, but then moved one stockinette stitch in on each decrease row, replacing a pattern stitch with the plain stitch. That maintained the six-stitch stockinette border. I didn't know how well that was going to work, if it would look the way I hoped, until I tried it. But I'm really happy with it.
The one thing that didn't turn out as planned is the shoulder.
It's actually straight in real life, I just pinned it out poorly. But I wanted to add another 1" wide strip of stockinette at the top, before binding off the shoulder. I thought that would make a nice frame all the way around, and would make a nice shoulder seam - with stockinette on both sides, there would be no weird pattern juxtaposition at the shoulder seam. However, when I finished the neck decreases, the directions said to work even until the piece measured so many inches from the armhole marker, and it turned out it already measured that, right then. Not having anticipated that, I didn't work the last inch in stockinette; didn't want to rip it out and do it over; and didn't want to add an inch more to the length. So ... the front ends at the shoulder seam like you see.
I actually don't think this is much of a disaster, though ... it actually ended right at the end of a pattern repeat, so it looks okay (and had I done the 1" strip of stockinette, it would have ended somewhere in the middle of the pattern repeat, which I don't think would have looked as nice). My decision now is whether to do the back the same way, and just have the two pattern edges come together there, which probably wouldn't look so bad, with one set of leaves merging right at their mid-point, and the other set being point to point.
Or go ahead and add my stockinette strip on the back (since now I will know when I'm getting to it), and then have pattern on the front of the shoulder and just stockinette on the back. If I did that, I'd probably make the stockinette strip on the back wider, like kind of a mini-yoke, instead of just a one inch strip.
I'll have to put some more thought to that. And take into consideration how I want the top of the sleeves to look too. Wow - this designing thing is fun!
In gardening news: this was the other project I mentioned last weekend, that I didn't post pictures of because it wasn't done yet. It's still not technically 'done,' but ... here it is.
This was Greg's brainchild, built from scrap parts from his job that otherwise would have been thrown out. The bottom is a beacon light casing, now with a regular colored light bulb wired into a photocell that automatically turns it on near dusk, and off in the morning. The top is some type of plastic dish thing, I forget what it was originally for. It was white, Greg spray-painted the inside silver, and the outside green with a leaf pattern, made by placing leaves from a tree on the bowl, then spray-painting over them. I forgot to take pictures of that, though. The pagoda was mine - it is actually a cast iron tealight candle holder.
I'm still pondering how I feel about this. On the one hand, I like it in theory, and I'm generally perfectly okay with having unique things in the garden that one wouldn't otherwise necessarily consider 'garden stuff.' I like having a waterfall, and I have abandoned trying to build one from rocks - tried that, not going to work with this pond. For one reason, the space behind the pond is too cramped to work in, to build it right; and for two things, it's just too much of an enormous pain in the butt for me.
This looks quite intriguing at night, with the subtle light of the purple party bulb lighting up the rippling surface of the pond and the near surroundings.
But to be perfectly honest, the large amount of plastic is just bugging me. It just seems so incongruous. The bottom part seems overly large to me, too - out of scale with the rest of the stuff in that area. I've tried to figure out a way to camouflage it while still allowing the glow from the light to show, but I haven't thought of anything yet - there's no room anywhere near it to plant something to grow in front of it, it's hanging right out over the edge of the pond.
I am going to ponder it over the next week or two, giving it a fair chance to settle in, and see how I feel then. It may just be that I'm not used to it yet.
If I do decide I can't adjust to it in the pond garden, it won't be scrapped entirely ... I would like to use the components somewhere else in the yard. Whether as a waterfall, I don't know ... it depends on whether we put in another water feature. We could move the light somewhere else, and keep the silver dish, just mounting it on something else. We can find other lighting options, I'm sure.
Well. It will bear some thinking on.
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