Pam Alison Knits

Oh, how happy I would be to sit here and write that I’ve been quietly working on my knitting these past few weeks and, look, here are some finished objects. I am working on my knitting, but any finishing is in the far distant future.

My current project is The Replicant, my second cardigan based on “Birdhouse” by Martin Storey. I wear the first version a lot and this blue example is going to be incredibly useful in my wardrobe through the autumn and winter, and into next spring. Yet progress has been slow, what with the hot summer weather, my lack of energy, and various projects around the home. Now it’s August and I’m starting to believe that autumn is a possibility, regardless of how far away it remains. The urge to knit is ramping up. I’ve been in search of videos from last autumn showing knitters hitting their stride as the days shorten.

The realisation that this project has been on my needles since April was a shock. I’ve only completed two sleeves which is woeful progress. I was hoping to say that I’d completed two sleeves and one of the fronts, therefore claiming to be halfway through the garment, but this is where we hit a major snag. I had been merrily making my way through the first front, had completed the ribbing, and got the main body done up to the armhole shaping. I cast off the required number of stitches around the armhole, counted my remaining stitches, and found I had too many left on the needle. I was baffled. I had very assiduously made sure I was working everything for the size I needed.

Oh, foolish me! There are two versions of this garment – one has a dual-coloured pattern which calls for you to cast on a larger number of stitches then reduce them later to take account of the different tightness of multi-coloured knitting. The other, the one I’m following, has a smaller number of stitches from the start. I had cast on the larger number of stitches, but totally recognised that I didn’t need to reduce the number if I was knitting the plain version of the cardigan, so I had knitted most of this part of the cardigan with too many stitches. The only thing to do was to unravel what I had knit and start again, casting on the right number of stitches. It was Saturday teatime when I made this annoying discovery. Now, at Sunday lunchtime, I am in recovery mode and have made some progress with the re-start. I will undoubtedly be able to finish this part of the cardigan in the next week, always assuming I will pick it up and knit on it regularly. Still, two sleeves and half a front isn’t particularly impressive for four months work. C+, could do better.

I have, however, added another two cones of the JC Rennie Supersoft wool to my “preparing for retirement” stash. I think I will get two more and then call it a day. My recent additions are Cornflower, a mid-toned shade, and Ecru White which is a basic neutral I’ll probably combine with other wools for a marled effect. Mind you, a 4-ply Ecru cardigan isn’t a bad idea for summer wear so you never know.

My cone stash now falls neatly in the colours I’m thinking of as the neutrals (above) and the brights (below). Alternatively, we could think of them as base colours and accent colours.

Taken all together, these colours make me happy and I’m going to enjoy opening my wardrobe door to see knits in all these wools in, oh, just a hundred years or so.

I’m hoping to go to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Harrogate this November, which would be ideal for picking up some skeins of sock wool. There tend to be several hand-dyers at the shows so it’s a great opportunity to choose single skeins in the flesh. These small producers can only dye limited quantities of yarn and there’s a tendency for them to put an update on their web shop and have everything sell out within a few hours. I think this is a legitimate result of cottage industry. However, some producers have a reputation for selling exceptional products which are very hard to buy, so the atmosphere of scarcity sometimes feels a bit forced. I am not interested in the more extreme Instagram feeding frenzies around yarn releases, so a show is a good place to pick up something that I probably won’t ever bother to stalk on the web. Also, there may be some international products which I wouldn’t order (shop local if it’s at all possible), but which I would try if I could buy in person. This is equally true of the pen shows where I have found products that I would have been reluctant to order in from abroad.

So, that’s my little knitting update. Perhaps next week I’ll do a round-up of all the other things I haven’t got done over the past few weeks. I dare say if my knitting picks up something else will fall by the wayside to accommodate it. If I was to ignore what I know about myself, I’d be thinking that I’m getting closer and closer to having lots of time to pursue all my hobbies. However, I know that however much time I have, I’ll still get less done than I intend. Never mind, there’s always tomorrow.