Forwards and back...

After getting royally stuck on a repeat of the Koigu lace scarf (I'd not worked on it for ages and kept making silly mistakes) I managed to complete quite a few more repeats over the long weekend, and whilst watching tv to boot! My lace skills must be getting better! Have almost come to the end of the second ball, only three more to go (I might only use two if it looks to be getting too long).

Knitting brings pure joy inspired me to have a go at creating lace shawls. I figured I'd have a go on the Passap - after all, if I could get it going, I could run the motor and leave it unattended! No such luck. Lace on the Passap seems to involve two rows knitting and then transferring stitches from one bed to another. Althought it was good practice with the as-yet unused U100 transfer carriage, all I ended up with was a mass of loops. So not something I can really automate, alas. Also, the tension needs to be quite high, to give a cobweb lace effect, and as the Passap uses strippers to push down the knitting, as opposed to weights on the Japanese machines, it was doomed to go wrong really. Oh well!

Had planned to cast on the Kauni cardigan today (bandwagons? I'm usually a year behind or so!) - took me a while to locate the pattern, and I've discovered the two circular needle sizes required are not in my Denise needle set, so a trip to Hobbycraft is required. I could have probably gotten away with 3.75mm for 3.5, but I don't have a 3mm circular in any shape or form. Unless I want a loose welt, I guess I'm gonna have to cough up the dough!

Still not certain what to do with the Marble chunky cardigan. I'm not quite sure what went wrong; I rechecked the pattern I used and the shape was correct, so all I can assume is that my tension square measurements weren't accurate enough. I think it will need to be frogged and redone, alas. I hate frogging, not least because my sewing up is so neat it's quite hard to undo it sometimes! Still, at least I should be able to get a good tension measurement from the back before I frog it.