Confidette completed

I have finished my Confidette bolero, which is something of a relief. I found it much harder work than the Wondrella cardigans - although I must stress that this was due to my limitations as a novice knitter, not Tasha's pattern, which was excellent as ever.

The bolero being blocked

To my surprise and relief, I had knitted the first sleeve head correctly, and it joined as it should at the underarm. Then it was just a case of knitting in the round, with decreases, until I reached the cuff. By this stage it was obvious that I was going to have sufficient wool from the Wondrella leftovers, and hadn't needed that extra ball after all. Still, better safe than sorry.

The second sleeve was a definite 'sleeve island' slog. My stitch pick-up was a tiny bit better, but still left a lot to be desired, and I can't say that knowing what I was doing made the second sleeve head much easier, either. Once the sleeves were done, I tried the bolero on to see if the body needed any more length. It was hard to tell, as the knitting curled up, but I decided that it was fine. Mind you, that choice may just have been from the desire to get the thing finished!

Apologies for the wobbly phone-and-mirror photo!

I don’t know if picking up stitches is anyone's favourite part of knitting, but it certainly isn't mine, and there were almost 200 stitches to pick up round the fronts and neck.

Knitting the first band of the border

I decided not to knit the border in the round, as I couldn't face the prospect of 400-stitch purl rows. Instead I followed Tasha's option of knitting it flat and sewing it up at the end, which has the advantage of creating smooth rows of the different colours.

Not perfect, but pretty good

It's only when you are casting off that you get to see the front corners properly, and to a newbie like me, they do look very impressive.

Magic!

One advantage of doing the sleeves first was that I got to practice the new to me (Icelandic) bind off on short edges. Despite this, I still feel that I may have bound off the fronts too tightly, as the fronts rise up at the centre in a way which they don't on Tasha's examples. Also, it seems to have ended up a bit too wide around the waist, and the fit just generally feels a bit 'off'. I'm hoping that some of these niggles are simply the result of what I did find at times a frustrating knit, and that they will fade over time. For now, I'm taking inspiration from my dressmaking and regarding it as 'wearable toile', and a good use of leftover yarn.

The length is perfect at the back

Showing the border round the neck

It also helps that it goes beautifully with this dress, which I bought from Fantouche Vintage when I was in Edinburgh in June. I very rarely wear true vintage, as it is always too long in the torso for me. However, Rhona had several seamstress-made dresses which must have been sewn for wearers who were as short-waisted as I am (the orange and green one in the photo above is another of my purchases), and fitted me perfectly - joy! The blue dress is sleeveless, so a light-cover-up is a perfect accessory.

The colours work so well with this vintage print

I have got yarn stashed for another Confidette, but I think that I will knit something else first before I dive into that. Watch this space!

Progress of a sort

I've had lots to do this week (a situation which isn't going to change any time soon), so not much time for sewing or knitting. I have however got a little bit of both done, with one project going rather better than the other.

My summer version of Simplicity 4463 is coming along. I have made up the front and the back, joined them at the shoulders, and attached the sleeves and the facing. After the problem of Butterick 5997 I am always worried about V necklines ending up too low, so I raised this one a bit - and then worried instead about whether or not I could get my head through it! Happily, it has turned out just fine.

Happy with the front . . .

. . . and with the back

There's a lot of hand sewing to do next, so it will be a while before I have a completed dress.

I'm also continuing to work away on my Confidette bolero. I must admit, I'm not enjoying this pattern as much as I did Wondrella. The back and fronts were fine, but once they were joined together, I found the long rows (over 200 stitches) a real slog. Assuming that I do knit a second version in my 'good' wool, I think that I will knit the three pieces separately, and sew them together. This also means that I can do the whole thing in lever knitting.

Confidette progress

Yes, there are two balls of wool attached to the bolero in the above picture. I have changed the order of construction. Instead of knitting the main border and then the sleeves, I'm doing the sleeves first. Although I had a lot of wool left over from my first Wondrella, it turned out that I did need to buy an extra ball, and it was impossible to match the dye lot. The new lot doesn't look any different from the original, but in an abundance of caution I've decided to knit the body of the bolero in the original wool. If the new ball is a slightly different colour, it won't show so much in the stripes of the border.

I'm not thrilled with my pick-up-and-knit on the sleeves, either. It looks very loose, so much so that I think I will need to sew it slightly tighter - in which case I might as well have knitted the sleeves separately as well.

The join is very gappy

It looks messy on the inside, too

I'm not entirely sure that I have understood the instructions for the sleeve, either, and am bracing myself for having to frog it and try again. Hopefully with a better cast on. On the plus side, knitting the pattern in a basic acrylic before trying it in more expensive wool is currently looking like a very sound move!

The good, the bad and the ugly

The last time I posted about my knitting, I mentioned how much I am enjoying the fact that this is something totally new to me, so there is lots to learn. Perhaps I should have been careful what I wished for, as this week has involved a lot of learning!

My knitting needle bag contains my mum's and grandmothers' needle collections, assorted cast offs (no pun intended) from other people, and some which I have bought for specific projects.

Inside my knitting needle bag

They are a mix of old and new sizes, mostly metal, a few plastic. Long-gone brand names like Milward and Aero feature heavily. For the most part, I have just used whatever pair I have found in there which are the right size and length.

My Wondrellas have been knitted on straight metal needles, with the sleeves done on circular metal needles of different lengths.

Wondrella needles

My Dahlia shawl started on straight metal needles, and quickly moved to straight bamboo which gave better control of the yarn. When the rows got too long for straight needles, I discovered interchangeable circular needles, in this case beech Basix from KnitPro.

Dahlia needles

I started Confidette on straight metal needles as normal, but eventually it was easier to switch to a circular needle. The pattern requires a longer circular needle for working the border than I had, so I bought this in Edinburgh and switched to it straight away.

This didn't feel very zingy to me

Sorry KnitPro, but I just couldn't get on with this at all. Even though I use metal needles most of the time, these ones just made my hands cramp up. Very odd.

My local fabric and wool shop has recently got a few interchangeable wood needles in, so once I felt well enough to venture out, I bought these.

These looked promising

The wooden tips were much more comfortable to use, and things were progressing nicely, until . . .

Aaargh!

This photograph was taken after I had managed to run an emergency lifeline through what I hoped was most of the dropped stitches. At some point the tip had detached from the cable, and I had been blithely knitting stitches which simply fell off the back end of the tip. About 60 stitches on a row of 210 were just hanging loose.

I did consider just frogging back to the lifeline below, but decided that I would at least try to save it. I had to transfer the remaining stitches off the tip and onto the lifeline, then reattach the tip to the cable and try to transfer the stitches back onto the needle from the lifeline.

Some of the stitches I had only caught partially or not at all, and for these I had to unravel them to the next row down and pick them up with a crochet hook. Once I had rescued all the stitches, I decided to unpick the row stitch by stitch and reknit it, to make absolutely certain that everything was properly in place. Needless to say all this took quite some time, but it did work.

Unsurprisingly, after all that, I wasn't very confident about continuing to use these needles. It was hard to photograph, but the thread for screwing in the cable seems to start quite a long way down the tip, so I'm not sure how well the two are fastened together.

The start of the screw thread is just visible right at the bottom

I turned to Ewe and Ply, who saved the day by speedily sending out a set of KnitPro Ginger tips and a cable. Like the Basix, these use a key to make sure that the tip is properly attached, and they are really comfortable to knit with.

Back on track

So this week I have learned that not all knitting needles are created equal, and that there's more to it than just grabbing the first pair of the right size from my bag. On the plus side, I'm now a fair bit more confident in my fixing skills if something goes wrong.

More adventures in knitting

I have started a new knitting project.

New pattern!

If the yarn looks familiar, that's because it's the leftovers from my blue Wondrella - out of an abundance of caution I had bought far too much. My original plan was to use it up on this project, but then I decided that it was time to work with some better quality wool. This was duly swatched but, when I came to cast on, I had a crisis of confidence about my ability to do it justice. So, I reverted to plan A.

The pattern is Confidette byTasha of Tasha Could Make That. Like Wondrella, it's a design which I could happily have in several colourways, so that pure merino will get used at some point - once I know what I’m doing.

Confidette is a top-down knit, which is perfect for someone like me who has to shorten the torso of any sewing or knitting pattern. It came out some time before Wondrella, but I was put off by the fact that it uses short rows to shape the shoulders. Fortunately, Tasha has recently added an excellent video on short row shaping to her YouTube channel (you can watch it here), and once I watched that, I discovered that it was less scary than I had imagined.

Even so, I still managed to end up with an extra stitch somewhere on my first attempt, and had to frog the whole thing. Possibly trying a new technique late at night wasn't the best idea! A second attempt the next morning went far better. I'm fascinated by the shaping it produces, and the fact that it's barely visible. (One of the things which I'm loving about knitting is that it's all new to me. Sewing is my first love, and always will be my 'thing', but there's no denying that having made my own clothes for over 40 years, I'm fairly familiar with most of what's involved.)

The curved edge is like magic to me

I bought a paler blue for the contrast edging, but it will be some time before I need it.

Even more blue

So for now, it's on with knitting the back.