During the last few tumultuous weeks (2 funerals in the last 2 weeks and 1 more on Friday - and, no, sadly I am not joking) knitting has been a source of calm and peace. What do people who don't knit do in these circumstances? There is increasing research into the calming effects of the repetitive nature of activities such as knitting but all of us who knit know that no research is required - we simply know that we'd go insane without it!
So yesterday morning the sun came out briefly and we rushed out and photographed some of the things we've been knitting here at Knit Wits. I'm not going to write about them all at once because that would make a very long entry so, for today, I'll just talk about Margarita from Adriafil. You may remember that, when I last wrote about it, I said it reminded me of colours on the sand so, inevitably, a garment had to be made.
The tension is not quite a standard Aran - not critical for some garments but I wanted to knit a little summer top for an impending (hot) holiday. After some research I found that it very closely matched Rowan's now discontinued All Seasons Cotton. For those of you who haven't discovered this yet, you can visit Rowan's website and become a member (for free) and, suddenly, a whole heap of FREE patterns are available to you - some old and some new. Amongst them are All Seasons Cotton patterns and, lo, there was the perfect pattern for me - Pagan - which comes in both a crew neck, v neck and cap sleeved version - perfect!
I needed to change the needle sizes to get the right tension so knitted on 4mm and 4.5mm instead of the 4.5 and 5.00mm on the pattern and I went up a size and it worked perfectly and knitted up in no time at all. Please excuse my post-winter scarily white arms in this photo (!):
and here is the stitch detail so you can see what I mean about grains of sand:
I used 6 balls of Margarita knitting the medium size v-neck vest - which is exactly the same quantity as All Seasons Cotton.
Now I just need a beach and some sun and to be as slim and young as the Rowan model!!
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