My first Circular Shawl

Its been a few days since I last blogged, the reason being the shawl that you see in the pic. I cast on for this on Feb 1 and it has taken me two weeks to finish this project. Its the first circular shawl I have ever done, what has put me off doing circular shawls is the number of stitches you use to cast on - six little stitches joined in a circle -impossible for my fingers but a wise freind Zephyrama gave me an alternative cast on using crochet which worked a treat after that it was plain sailing. The longest part of the shawl was working the border that took me a couple of days to do but it was worth the effort. I am happy with the way it turned out.

No Parking here

I wanted to show you the differences between knitting through the back loop as opposed to knitting through the front and so I dragged out a doll I had been working on late last year, but had put down because I had made a mistake and didn't want to fix it.

Turns out that I couldn't fix it but that wasnt too bad I only had to reknit the body, so I dragged out the yarn and started knitting. Then I compared what I had knitted from months ago with my newly knitted piece. The piece on the left is the one I knitted months ago, tension is loose, stitches are huge (big enough to park a truck in!). Now the piece on the right, stitches are even, tension is good, and the garage space has been taken out of the stitches. I much prefer the look of the right hand piece, so I think I'm going to keep on knitting through the front, it may give me the prod I need to get back into knitting things like cardigans and sweaters, something I sort of gave up on because my gauge never seemed to be accurate, it must be harder to get a good tension through the back loop, maybe because you don't have as good a control over the yarn feeding to the stitch, whereas through the front loop you do.

The doll by the way is The Mad Hatter by Alan Dart part of a series of The Alice in Wonderland Story and no he is not finished yet, but I will get to him once I finished this er, um (mumble) lace pattern...........!

An Old Dog and New Tricks

After my gob smacking, soul destroying discovery yesterday, I quickly evaluated my situation. Should I give up knitting altogether and direct my attention to other hobbies? Should I delete all the projects of my knitting online so others cannot see the glaring problem that I so blissfully ignored? The conclusion I came to was no...my work isn't that bad, sure it has a slight twist but 20 years of knitting and all I had in comments have been nice about the twist that appears within my knitted pieces I haven't had a negative comment at all, so they will stay.

Last night I got back on the horse that threw me and began some practise swatches. Some observations I have about stitch that I'm re-learning, the tension is better in my knitting, my stitches are more even and better defined, and the stitch is just as easy as knitting thru the back, though I do have to watch myself as mindless as swatch knitting is sometimes when your attention is not on your knitting you tend to slip back into bad habits. They say it takes three weeks to form a bad habit, I wonder how long it will be before I break this 20year old bad habit.