Hudson on Hold

Last week I made a concerted effort to finish my Hudson hoodie. This project had been hanging round for far too long and I thought it was about time to release it from the doldrums at the bottom of my knitting bag and actually wear the thing!

I worked on it every spare moment, nap times and evenings; the endless moss stitch hood was finally finished, a sleeve edge picked up and knit (apologies for the night time, bad light photos!).

I had a whole ball of yarn left and decided it was time to pick up for the button band, which wraps all the way around the hood and down both sides. There were a mega amount of stitches to pick up, something like 440, but I sat and spent one whole evening picking them up evenly onto a long circular needle.

Each row seemed to take forever as it was all in rib and the hoodie itself was pretty heavy by now. The buttonhole row took extra time - I decided to add in an extra button hole than the pattern suggested, as I wanted one right at the bottom too. I used this Masterclass to help me make my buttonholes as neat as possible - they still aren't perfect, but better than ones I have knit before.

Then the worst happened - I could see I was running out of yarn. I decided to cast off a row early as I really didn't want this button band sitting on the needles, it would be far too easy for stitches to drop off. I had just enough yarn to cast off (and I mean just - there was about a centimetre left!).

But I was left with one sleeve edging and two pocket edgings to knit. I had a feeling I would be in this position as my tension for the project was so drastically wrong, since I discovered part way through that I was knitting in a finer gauge yarn than the pattern specified. Unfortunately, I had used Knit Picks yarn from Great British Yarns which is the only UK supplier and they no longer had the colour in stock. Was I destined never to finish this hoodie?

Fortunately for me, Ravelry exists. After a trawl through the stashed Wool of the Andes yarn, I actually found some in the same dye lot in one lovely person's stash, and we are currently arranging for her to ship it to me all the way from the US. Isn't the Internet a wonderful thing?

Hopefully I will be back to share the finished item very soon!

 

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Work in Progress

Well it's been a while since I've blogged, and that is mainly because I've both been a little more busy than usual and I haven't had any finished objects to share. I've been organising my return to work (which fortunately isn't until June so I have a while to go yet), seeing friends and even visiting the theatre - fancy! Seriously though, me and some friends went to see Birdsong at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, and if you get the chance to see this you should definitely go. I have never really got on with the book and became bored quickly by the recent BBC adaptation with Eddie Redmayne, but I ended up sobbing though half of the stage production, it was really well done. Don't you just love stage sets? Just enough there to set the scene but still plenty for the imagination to do, to make the story your own.

So what is on my needles at the moment?
Firstly, we have my Hudson hoodie.

I started this so long ago, and then got bored because I was knitting what should have been an Aran weight garment in what was closer to a dk weight yarn - it still worked out because basically the whole pattern is done by lengths, but the knitting seemed to go on forever.

I have made a real push to get it finished in the last week and it is starting to look like a hoodie now. Just trying not to lose the will to live while knitting interminable amounts of moss stitch for the hood!
When not knitting my hoodie, I've been trying to add a few rows to my Anniken Allis Lazuli shawl - this is going to be a long term project I can tell, but the yarn is beautiful and I will get it done one day. I've made a small error in one of the pine cone motifs when I dropped a stitch, but I'm hoping it won't notice too much...

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