There has been more book aquisition! The beau and I dropped into Borders on the weekend. My hopes of finding Vogue Knitting were dashed, but then I’m not sure I want to pay the inflated airmail price anyway. In the knitting books section I found Knitting New Scarves. Though there aren’t any scarves in this book that I’m itching to knit, the techniques are intriguing and give me ideas.

The other two books here I ordered from The Wool Baa. The Patons Inca book I bought because I have lots of the yarn and I want to make a jacket. There are two patterns in here I like:

Close to what I was thinking of, but I don’t like the way the collar sits around the neck so I’ll omit the shaping there. In fact, I might also pick up stitches and knit sideways rather than knit a separate collar and sew it on. That’s a lot of sewing. I’m also thinking I might knit a size larger than I normally would, so it isn’t so pulling-open-ey. But that’ll depend on whether I have enough yarn.

I like this, but I’m not really into wide belts, and I suspect you’d need one to pull this off. However, it did occur to me that I could knit in a fake belt, in a stitch pattern that might pull the waist in a little. Hmm.

There’s enough of this yarn to knit both jackets. Ironically, the colours of the two batches of Inca I have are brown and red, but I’d have to knit the longer jacket in brown because there isn’t enough of the red.

The other pattern book was double the price, but contains a pattern I’ve been lusting after for over a year. Alex:

In this case, the pattern came before the yarn rather than the other way around. I’m hoping to knit this in the dark blue possum merino I bought in New Zealand, as it seems to knit up more like a 10ply/aran than a 8ply/dk.

Unfortunately I don’t much like any of the other patterns in the book. In fact, some of them are downright frumpy and ugly.

Both of these projects require the right buttons. I can see some button shopping in my future. In the meantime, I’ve been working on my uncharacteristically long list of wips:

The baby blanket grows slowly.

The first I Love Patonyle has sprouted a heel.

And the Endpaper Tam has burst into colour.

(Okay, enough with the garden references.)