Yesterday morning was spent getting a knitting pattern together, so that Talyssa can have her very own fuzzy mohair sweater.  I wanted to use a larger needle size since Talyssa is a bigger doll, and I didn’t want to be knitting her sweater for days and days and days on end.  My mohair/silk yarn is lace weight and it is already quite “airy” for the smaller dolls, so I thought that holding two strands of yarn together to make a heavier yarn would work great on larger needles.

I started figuring things out by knitting a swatch with the same needle size that I use for Talyssa’s basic wool sweater and then evaluated it.  The fabric was a bit dense and stiff, I thought.  I knit another swatch on a size larger needles and thought it looked just right, nice and “airy”.

The next step was to start with Talyssa’s basic wool sweater pattern and adjust the stitch counts and rows using the new gauge.  After some division, multiplication and number rounding, I had a pattern to start with.

I love doing this kind of math work!  Who knows why!  I would think that it would make me want to pull my hair out, but for some reason I find it mentally invigorating.

Now to knit.  And, I did, all afternoon and evening on Tuesday, and hoping and hoping that it would come out perfect.  At “bedtime” on Tuesday I only had 12 more rows to go, and it is all body knitting, easy!  The sleeves got finished on Tuesday night, they seemed to take forever, turning my work constantly, it seemed.  Talyssa has long arms.

I finished up Talyssa’s sweater before Wednesday afternoon started.  I did a quick try on before blocking and it will fit her!  Yay!  Now I will get started on her dress.  I took a photo of Talyssa’s sweater next to one for the Little Darlings to see the size difference. Yes, they are quite different in size, but what I thought was even more interesting was the difference in lot colors of the yarn.  Talyssa’s was knit with a couple of skeins that I just received and the Little Darling’s was knit with yarn that I received earlier in the year.

2015 is going fast!  My daily Mary Engelbreit calendar pages are almost gone!

Oh, I just heard it’s National Chocolate Day.  Have you had some today?  It’s my sweet of choice–I have some dark chocolate daily.

Bye for now and thanks for reading!

I spent the bulk of the day yesterday working on my DPNs.  I stopped knitting the hat I showed you yesterday and decided to learn the invisible cast on technique so I could knit from the top down.

You are probably wondering why.  Good question and I have a good answer.  That white mohair, while so beautiful for its fuzziness, tends to get knitted in with the red wool.  It is so fuzzy that for nearly 10+ rows after changing to my red wool I am still trying to get it to stay out of my red stitches.  Truthfully, it is nearly impossible to do this 100% and that bothers me if it is avoidable, and it is; the solution is to knit with the white mohair last.

Okay, so that meant learning the invisible cast on.  The first thing trying to learn this new cast on taught me is that I am not very coordinated, and I don’t have a photographic memory in the least.  I watched the tutorial again and again and again.  Hmm, where have I heard those words before?  There are four needle movements for every two stitches cast on.  Finally, I had to write out a cheat sheet and I was then able to perform the steps four times to get 8 stitches cast on.  I won’t lie, it probably took me an entire hour to get this.  And then, I kept on practicing it throughout the day to get it down better.

You probably have no idea what my notes mean, but it was all I needed to get this down, sort of.

And, after a day and evening of knitting this is what I made for my Little Darling, Gina!

Here’s my Santa hat, my first DPN project!  I had the pom pom left over from last year, so I pinned it on where the one that will match this outfit will go.

For next time, I will use a rewritten pattern to make it a bit longer with a wider “fur” trim band.  I also don’t like knitting garter in the round because it involves purling in the round, which I am not comfortable doing, so I will probably knit that part flat and make a short seam for that area.  I found pics of garter stitch in the round and it looks seamed anyway.

Oh, Happy October everyone!  It really feels fall-ish here todyay, very breezy and cool with  puffy white and dark clouds moving rapidly across the sky, but it’s mostly sunny; it’s a very perfect fall day in my opinion.  And, the moon is still out at almost 10:00 am!

Thanks for reading and big thank yous for your comments.  I love reading them and commenting back.  I work by myself all day (except for my dogs, of course), so it is so nice to connect with my readers.

Bye for now!