Busy, busy, busy

It's been a couple days since I posted, but I've been busy. First of all, Clapotis #2 is finished!!





I used a little over 1½ skeins (10 oz each) of Caron Rainbow Dreams in the Rosy Forecast colorway and 10.5 needles. I wound up inadvertently with 14 repeats in the straight section as I knitted past the point to start the decrease section and it was easier to keep going than to frog back. The finished measurements are approximately 30x92". It still scrunches up to form a scarf and as a shawl, the drape is much softer & more fluid than the Jetstream one worked on size 8 needles. I'm tempted to christen this one "Avery" because it reminds me so much of my Grandfather's roses that grew on the fence between the yard and the vegetable garden.

In other news, the garage sale season continues to open and at an unadvertised sale this morning I found a ramie & cotton cardigan for 10¢ that I bought to practice recycling techniques. The buttons alone are probably worth a dollar or two, so I figured that I couldn't loose.



I checked the seams and found that only the shoulders were serged, making it a good candidate for frogging. The other seams were joined by chain stitched seams that, once I found an end, came out quickly. The shoulder seams had to be cut out which resulted in a number of short lengths that I put aside for tying the skeins once the sweater was unraveled.



I used the antique swift to make the skeins which wasn't all that handy - i.e. I have quite a backache from bending over. I found that if I put the sweater section that was being unwound on the seat of one of the kitchen chairs and held it there with my knee, it kept the yarn winding around the swift at a level that prevented it from coming over the top of the upper arms and tangling. If I do this very often, I plan on finding a way to fasten a board to the bottom of the swift so I can step on it out of the way of the revolving arms and hold it in one place as it had a tendency to "walk" as I was winding. Once a section was unraveled and wound on the swift, I tied it in a figure "8" on all 4 sides.



I only ran into one serious problem and next time I'll know to look for it. The buttonholes on the front of the cardigan were vertical, so they were overstitched and cut rather than bound off horizontally. This meant that I lost most of the yarn in that section. You can see the stitching here along with the undersides of the buttons (I think that they may be shell) that's really nicer than the fronts.



And here is the salvaged yarn. After taking this photo, I washed it in the bathroom sink and it is now hanging over a towel wrapped curtain rod that's balanced between the top of the tub surround and the shower curtain rod. Once it's dry, I'll put it back on the swift and wind it into balls, then decide what I'm going to do with it.



On a completely different topic, I changed the archiving settings for the blog to weekly as I've been told that it takes a while to load with a dial up connection with all the photos. Having only a week's posts on the main page should help somewhat while keeping the older photos available in the archives.