Busy Lizzy

Had a very busy weekend - Saturday was the monthly Needles of Steel Machine Knitting club, so the morning was spent digging out equipment, and preparing for a slip stitch demo. Got some ideas for next month's meeting - technically that's in May, as we are meeting on the 9th April to go to the Nottingham show. Sample went ok and the two-colour one too once I got the row in sync. Did you know you can use a simple pattern with two-colour tuck or slip and get a mosaic or maze pattern? It's one of the cool things in machine knitting - a completely different pattern appears as if by magic! Works best with simple geometric patterns set to double row but it's worth just picking a card and trying it - you never know what you might get!

Some examples:
Slipstitch hearts
Aztec design
Various slip stitch & tuck stitch samples using a colour changer
"Sideways cables" made with slip stitch

Sunday was spent finalising my notes for an Argyle CSM workshop I'm giving at a CSM event in Kegworth this coming weekend. I knitted the world's ugliest Argyle sock (singular).  I'm also teaching the ribbing workshop from Bristol 2015 (with some minor updates). In the evening, the Cog and I cooked fantastic chinese pork and noodles (an old WW recipe) which was totally delicious. Then I sewed the rest of the buttons onto a bottle green shirt I'm sewing for him. Alas the pattern is late 90s, early 2000 and is a very loose casual shirt - and it drowns him, despite being the medium which is supposedly 34-36" chest (he is a 34). Have pinned it in various places with the idea of taking darts and side seams in, the bigger problem is that the sleeves are also too loose and too long - I may have to take them out and shorten them at the shoulder as I don't really want to redo the cuffs. So frustrating - I know I've been saying it was a test sew, but I was hoping it might not have come out QUITE so enormous.

No pictures of any of this I'm afraid, because I haven't taken any, ha! Taking the camera to Kegworth so hopefully there'll be some good shots of circular knitting machines and general socky, knitty fun next time.

Current mood: devious