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Progress on various and sundry

This week has been working on a bit of this and a bit of that. Two items have enough progress to show and tell.

First up, I’ve cast on and made some progress on the front of my Twisted Lines top. I was a little worried about picking up the extra long DPNs and knitting belt again after a break of several weeks, but it wasn’t as hard to get back into it as I feared. The first several inches of the front have been way less painful than the same bit of the back.

Several inches of knitting in a light blue/purple yarn with a center cable pattern on a long DPN. Background is a black piece of fabric with large bright flowers and leaves.

The pattern as written has the back and front knit identically up to the neckline, which splits into left and right much sooner on the front and continues as one piece up the back until the final inch. However, I spent a good hour before I cast on re-configuring the increases after the waist to shift more of the width of the top to the front.  Good news is that now I just have to follow the notes I wrote for myself. The challenge is not second guessing myself as I always go wrong when I do that – I need to trust to the calculations I did when working through it all beginning to end before I started. I’ll also need to add in a few short rows as well on the front.

The other thing I made some real progress on was the fingerless mitts for TheEnabler in nalbinding. I now have both cuffs done:

Two cuffs to fingerless mitts in fluffy yarn that shades from yellow/green to blue/purple, with the needle stuck into one of them

Since nalbinding is pretty free hand and gauge consistency is entirely on me (no tool to dictate it), I felt it was important to do both cuffs back to back.

One of the advantages to nalbinding is that since you have to break off short lengths of yarn anyway, messing with color changes in a long colorway is easy and you don’t end up with any more ends that you would have anyway (you splice the ends together typically). Now I’m just playing with the tougher dark grey yarn for the main hand part to get the right gauge.

My shawl is blocked, but I haven’t been able to get a good picture due to poor winter lighting. I promise one soon.