Treacle

Treacle seems to be the general state of my computer at the moment. Never exactly a greyhound in the speed stakes, it seems to be getting slower and slower as if gummed up with treacle. For this reason, there may or may not be pictures before a week next Wednesday.

Work on the Kauni jumper is moving forward, although I still haven't taken any pictures of the steek stitches. It's good TV knitting because, for all it requires a yarn in each hand, the actual pattern is very simple.

I've had to lay that aside for the moment, though, because the brown bag needs to be finished before Friday.
The knitting has progressed well. I've made the back and front of the bag and also three rectangles which could be uses as embellishments. I couldn't decide which yarn would look best so have done all three. The pieces are felted before making up (because the handle is a taffeta ribbon, which I'm sure wouldn't stand up to a high temperature).

These are the pieces, pre-felting:



I think the darker swatch on the bottom is probably the best one for embellishment purposes but I'll wait and see what it looks like after it's been felted.

Since I had the Cascade yarn on the needles, I thought I'd just have a little go at the flowers to go on the Noni bag. They are made using short-rows, which causes the petals to be concave - a very nice touch. My first attempt wasn't great:



The pattern does say "As you proceed you will notice "holes" in the middle of the petals. This is normal and the holes will close during felting." Well, that's as may be. I think those "holes" are too big to close during felting. So I decided to take steps to close the gap. There are various methods for doing this. Excellent explanation by Nona of the wrapped stitch technique, the yarn over way of going on, and, best of all in my opinion, the Japanese approach. She credits Lucy Neatby with the pin trick. A jolly good trick it is, too, otherwise I don't know how you'd manage to identify which loop to pick up.

This is the second petal:



I think you'll all agree that's much better.

And that's not all. I belong to the Charting Lace group on Yahoo (I joined to try and get my head round all this stuff when I was charting the She Sells Sea Shells pattern) and someone has started a very interesting topic. We are presented with an antique lace pattern in words and are to attempt to chart it. First up was the "Persian Lace Edging".

I've made a chart but trying to work out how to show it here has almost caused my head to explode. Before I throw a brick through the monitor I'm going to admit defeat. I've done a swatch though (stand back in amazement!)

This is the first one:



where I used paired decreases and a centred double decrease.

This is the second one:




where I just used K2tog throughout and K3tog for the double decrease. This is the one I prefer and the one that most closely resembles the original. I really don't think that the direction of the slant of the increases makes all that much difference in garter-based lace, which is what this is, in the main, although there is a very small stocking stitch section.

I might try this again as on a stocking stitch ground - where I'm sure the direction of the decreases would make a difference.

One more thing - I was/am knitting the Galveston Shawl as a KAL and was a member of the GalKal Yahoo group. Some horrible bungle with Ya-hell (not for the first time) has meant that I no longer have access to the files of that group. I've got all the charts downloaded apart from the edging, so if anyone has those charts, I'd be eternally grateful. Email me privately if you want - the address is in the side bar.

Enough.