I'm pretty happy with this

Well, I left off yesterday with my alpaca sweater stretched out arms akimbo with a promise that I would do the big reveal today Today the shackles are off and its a wonder of smooshy loveliness.

But it did not look so fabulous when I first cast off and tacked it together.  In fact the sleeve head was hopelessly too long and narrow.  How could that happen?  Well, I did follow the pattern, almost, but after the shaping (for the underarm bit) the instructions said to knit 7 rows, that seemed far to little so I added some more. Disaster! back to the drawing board

I needed more width across the middle of the sleeve head and less fullness at the crown.  Luckily there is lots of negative ease in this design so it has been very forgiving.  My modifications would not work on something more structured but they did here.  Fistly I got out my tape measure and calculator and worked out my tension to the half stitch.  Then I measures the exact circumference of my armhole and divided my rough chart into three sections A,B and C

A - The underarm. To get the extra width I cut out a lot of the shaping in the underarms and kept it to casting off 3 stitches at the beginning of the next 2 rows and  1 each end of the following 3 alternate rows.  I noted how long the edge would be to this point.  

C - The Crown. I decided to work all the rest of the decreases in the crown part until 18 stitches remained before casting off and calculated how long that would be.  

B- The middle section was calculated last, once I knew how many inches I needed to add to A and C to equal my armhole circumference I worked out the number of rows I needed to work straight.

I planned all this on paper and put in an afterthought lifeline before I ripped out the top section of both sleeves. 

You can see how uneven it all looked still, but blocking is miraculous!

 A lovely tidy edging

And a big sweeping swooshey neckline

As I mentioned before I have in mind a bright colour affection shawl to wear with my new sweater but for now blight does nicely.

The sun has come out At Last, but not too warm for a sweater yet.

xx

c

Blocking

My wonky sweater is all done!  The full story (modifications and all) tomorrow when it is dry and I can wear it.

xx

c

The Lendrum and a plea for help

I have signed up for an entirely new experience, I am going to learn to spin and this is my new baby

This is one of my mother's wheels, the other a traditional Ashford sits in my sister-in-law's dinning room waiting for her to learn too.  When my mother was alive I was not particularly interested in spinning, I did have a go one day and was rather impressed that Mum could spin but I preferred the local yarn shop experience of wandering the shelves marvelling at the colours and feeling the textures.  But it seems to me that if you are a yarn junkie then one day you have to face up to the ultimate fibre experience - spinning

Until last evening I did not even know what sort of wheel it was - all was revealed by scrolling through Google images of wheels until I found one that looked similar to mine and by following the links I am fairly confident it is a Lendrum.  But that is all I know and before I take my wheel to my first spinning class I would be so very grateful if any of you lovely readers of my blog could help me a little.

The wheels I found by my Google search seemed to have two pedals - mine has one, what is the difference?

I found one YouTube clip that showed the 'top bit' had less hooks than I have here - are all these used when threading the lead yarn?

Have I got the back knob in the right place (It had some yarn wound around it which seems to help it to lock in place)

And - is there a list somewhere of what all the parts are called?  Can I buy a hookey thing somewhere or do people improvise with a piece of wire?  I think this hook is the only bit missing, what do you think?

Finally are there any YouTube films that you would recommend for me to learn a bit more before I get to my lesson?

I'm itching to begin, so if anyone could help, I would be ever-so happy.  I have this basket of billowy alpaca

And this bowl of creamy BFL - all ready to go

xx

c