bad metaphor

The pinwheel baby blanket is done:

I’m a photography noob and don’t understand why all my photos keep turning out yellow. Tried color balancing it out in Photoshop, but unfortunately I’m a PS noob also.

Pattern is from Genia Planck, and the seed stitch ruffle shamelessly ripped from Hello Yarn. It is very easy to make; if you know how to do yarnovers and knit in the round, it goes by mindlessly. A little too mindlessly, as you can probably see from the gaffes in the blanket. Since the recipient will probably drool and throw up all over it, I’m not really beating myself up about the imperfections. A gallery full of better looking pinwheels is available here.

In other knitting news, I am making a sweater for the boy, for the cold German winter nights. This is in flagrant disregard of the Dread Sweater Curse, but it’s a silly superstition, right? Right?

Countless patterns have been run by the boy, only to be met with skepticism, until we both settled on Leo. Like the partner of the woman who designed this pattern, the boy likes this style – neutral color, ribbing, form flattering, nothing too flashy or tricksy. It has to be machine washable, but I didn’t want to give him a crummy acrylic sweater that he could buy from any cheap department store. So I looked at countless pricey yarns until I found that Knitpicks has a superwash wool available. What’s more, the boy really likes the gray color. Hooray!

I continued hooraying until, after knitting a gauge swatch, I realized that I was somehow managing to get the gauge just fine, but something was a bit off. The fabric was maybe a wee bit “stiff,” and by “stiff,” I mean like “corpse in latter stages of rigor mortis.” I scrutinized the pattern a little more closely, and realized that the specified yarn is 50% silk, 50% wool. Unsure of how this would make a difference, I posted on the Craftster forums about this predicament, and they agreed that I would probably have to adjust the pattern to my yarn, unless I wanted to knit a wooly suit of armor (the boy, unfortunately, does not intend to slay any dragons during his stay).

So there’s less than a month to go before he flies out to Bonn, and I am knitting like mad. The pattern doesn’t come with helpful schematics, so I’m half basing this on the pattern / half winging it using shirts he owns as a template. I’ve also adjusted the ribbing to a 5 x 2, as the boy liked it better – I’m changing so much already, hell, why not change the damn ribbing?

Fun challenge or soul-busting nightmare? That remains to be seen, in the next edition of Sweater Investigations: Curse or Worse?

I’m still optimistic about this working out, superstitions be damned. Though I’m in vague apprehension of the armhole shaping part. I should also probably mention that I’ve only knit one sweater before this: Tubey, a really easy pattern, replete with helpful schematics and tons of knitalongs and such. And none of this crazy armhole shaping / set-in sleeves business. From Google searching and the like, I haven’t been able to find a single person who has finished Leo and posted the results online (well, besides the pattern designer herself). Brilliant. Keep your needles crossed for me.

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