My attempt to shrink the body did help a little bit, but clearly not enough:

I have to admit, the word ‘hideous’ was the word that came into my head first when I saw these photos.

No, I’m not hunching my shoulders here. It just looks like I am.

Thank goodness for knitting blogs that make you take photos of yourself wearing your creations, so you know when something Does Not Look Good On You. These photos, when unaltered, left me wanting to work out, get a very padded bra, wear make up on a weekend, and go get my haircut fixed. (The hairdresser’s interpretation of ‘fringe’ and ‘layering’ and mine were vastly different.)

Thank goodness for Photoshop and the ability to adjust contrast, levels and saturation. (And for my habit of cropping out my head, though Norah Gaughan and co. can’t be held responsible for the state of it!) This is the best I could make the pullover look.

But unfortunately Photoshop can’t make a garment fit properly. The garment measurments are now reasonably close to the pattern specs. The problem is this pattern was designed for someone with a body shape completely different to mine. For someone with really skinny arms, a big chest and wide coathanger shoulders.

I’ve considered whether the waist shaping I added might be to blame. Perhaps a little. Having the side dip in to the wait has enhanced the fact that the underarm of the garment sits halfway down my upper arm. But it would have sat there anyway, waist shaping or no, and the body would have looked like a big shapeless sack.

No, I think the waist shaping will make it look terrific on someone with skinny arms, a big chest and wide coathanger shoulders. Anybody know someone built like that who might want to give this jumper a home?

I’ll be happy to post it to you. After all, in knitting not everything you make turns out exactly as you’d like it to. I enjoyed knitting this (though the reknit of the pentagons might have involved a little grumbling), learned something (pentagons aren’t scary), crossed another item off my Knit From Your Books list and reduced the stash a little. And it would be a shame to frog it when it could look great on someone else.

Yesterday I finished reknitting the pentagons. Today I tried it on. The verdict? Still a touch big. It’s probably turned out a size 12 in the body and a size 8 in the arms, when a size 10 overall would fit me. So what did I do?

I’ve attempted to shrink it. I filled the laundry sink with cold water and a shallow bucket with hot water. I dipped the body into the hot water – leaving the sleeves hanging out of the bucket – then into the cold, then back into the hot, then mixed the hot and cold so I could immerse the whole thing in warm water. Then I massaged the body a lot. And, finally, put it through a spin cycle.

I have no idea if it worked yet. It doesn’t look felted. Or much smaller. We’ll have to wait until it’s dry and I can try it on again.

In the meantime, I started a sock, using some Regia yarn and the Crosswalker pattern. I wanted a small, easy project to do while waiting to have a small test done in hospital yesterday. As it turned out, I only got a few rows done. But I knit more in the car on the way home.

I love winter, but lately I’ve really been feeling the cold. Today is recovery day and while I keep thinking of a dozen things I ought to be doing, I don’t want to go out into the cold wind and I’m probably too tired to do them anyway.

My cat has the right idea…

The Pirate Mittens are done!

And they fit just fine this time. This was such a fun project. I’m not sick of fair isle yet and have been printing out more free mitten patterns.

I’ve unpicked the sleeve cap of the Swirled Pentagon Pullover and frogged the pentagons. The test pentagon came out a fraction smaller than it should be, but since there’s no needle between the size I used previously and the one I’m now using I’m hoping the ribbiness of the pentagons means they’ll stretch enough to fit properly. I do have narrow shoulders, too. I’ve knit three of the new pentagons, and found the advantage of knitting them a second time is I can pick up stitches on the sleeve caps and eliminate the seam there. Coupla days and it should be finished (again).

The round yoke fair isle jumper had to be abandoned. After having stored the pattern and yarn together for the last year in anticipation of starting, it turned out the sub yarn is too thick. Reducing the needle size would have produced cardboard, and doing the math to reduce the stitches wasn’t going to be too scary at the yoke part.

So what am I going to knit instead? Well, I have two sock patterns and Starsky waiting on the sidelines, waving and shouting “Knit me! Knit me! Stop looking at fair isle mittens and knit me!”.

Some years back there was a Flash Your Stash meme doing the rounds of blogs. Since then I’ve dragged out all my stash and photographed it every six months. Yesterday I was recovering from aches and pains after painting the guest room, so I took all the yarn out of the bookcase and spread it on the daybed.

Well, most of the yarn. I have a small stash of acrylic for ’emergencies’ and another box of project leftovers, but since those yarns aren’t waiting to be used I don’t consider them ‘stash’.

Each of the bookcase hollows holds one large and one small tub. I have eight of these ‘pairs’, plus one underbed storage box full of Inca, the yarn for Starsky and the s’n’b handspun.

A year ago I had four pairs of tubs and enough extra yarn from an adopted stash to fill another two.

So I think I can say the stash has increased by a third to a half in the last year. That’s a relief, as I was worried it might have doubled. I’m pleased to find most of the new yarn isn’t useless odd balls or yarn bought only because it was cheap. I’ve developed good yarn buying habits.

Stash flashing advantages:

* It stirs up enthusiasm for the projects I want to knit (though the pressure of wanting to knit them all NOW can be a disadvantage)

* It sometimes results in seeing ways of combining yarns that I hadn’t thought of before

* Skills I’ve developed in the last six months had me considering new ways of using stash yarn

* I realised I need to ease off buying knitting yarn as I want to buy more warp yarn and haven’t got anywhere to put it.

* I found some yarn to offer up if the s’n’b has a swap

* Time allows you to realise you really don’t love some yarns, and cull them

* I updated my stash spreadsheet, which has proven to a be surprisingly useful tool when wondering if I have enough of something for a project that just caught my eye

* Breathing in yarn fumes is a inexpensive, harmless way to enhance your mood

The disadvantages include rampant startitis, brought about by too much stirring up of yearning to start all the great projects I have lined up, enhanced by guilt at having not started them for so long, and exacerbated by the knowledge that once they’re out of the stash, the weight comes off the total on the spread sheet and everything fits better in the storage tubs.

I haven’t posted for a few days, basically because everything crafty seems to be kicking my butt at the moment.

First the Pirate Mittens put the boot in. I finished the first one bar the thumb and discovered that the cuff was bigger than the hand, and the hand was too small to comfortably fit my hand in it. I’d also swapped the sides I knit the yarns from – one on the left continental style, one on the right english style – three times and my tension must be different for the two styles as the black stitches were bigger or smaller depending which side I knit it on.

To top it off, I realised the pattern chart is shaded in reverse. The white squares are meant to be black, and the black are meant to be white. WTF? Is this some sort of piratey joke? So I frogged the entire mitten and started again, using smaller needles for the cuff and larger ones for the hand, and always keeping the yarns on the same side.

It looks much better in ‘reverse’.

As you know from my last post the Swirled Pentagon Pullover was doing some butt kicking of it’s own. After it had dried I tried it on.

If I hoick up the sleeves to the position they’re supposted to be in, the bat wing problem is almost non-existant. So I think I can safely conclude that the too-large pentagons are the problem. And they’re too big solely due to the fact that the designer (or editor) hasn’t a clue about US to metric conversion.

To fix this I should knit up a separate pentagon on 5mm needles and see if it comes out the right size. If not, I’ll knit it on 4.5 mm needles. Then I’ll have to unpick the top of the sleeves, unravel all the pentagons and knit them again.

I’m not quite up to facing that yet. I’m still at the cursing the designer stage. An what with the reversed out pirate mitten chart discovery on top, there’s been much cursing of designers lately.

As if that wasn’t enough, the weaving has been kicking my butt too.

After warping up the loom ready to weave some place mats out of the free handspun from s’n’b, I discovered that the stickiness of the yarn made the warp threads stick together, and it made for a very open weave. So I unwove what I’d done, skeined up all the yarn again, and washed it. When it was dry I tried again. No stickiness problem, but still an overly open weave. I’m thinking maybe this needs a more widely spaced warp. Maybe in linen or cotton instead of the wool I’d used. Since I figured this was going to take some experimentation, I’m not minding the butt kicking.

But the trouble is, warping up up the loom takes time, and taking off a warp and tying it back on later takes even more time. Better to start something else. So I took out some purple varigated yarn my mum bought me in New Zealand last year, for my birthday.

I’m thinking pillows, or a topper for the sideboard, to go in the guestroom.

And the guest room! It’s kicking my butt too. Just how many coats of Vivid Orange does it take to get a good flat colour? Sheesh!