Credit where credit is due

The equinoctial gales tore into town last weekend, ripping trees down and scouring my patio with rain, and finally the eerie eternal summer that we've been living through all September broke, bringing with it proper cool weather. Not very crisp, now, just about fifteen degrees centigrade; but fifteen is a lot more sensible than twenty for this time of year. Suddenly, there is a sense to all the piles of pure wool in my stash. And suddenly, my neck started thinking about feeling cold...



This is the lovely Herringbone Diagonal Rib pattern, as designed by Li, of Life's a Stitch. Alas, I have had to rip this back since, as the pattern is for a DK weight yarn, and I'm using a chunky weight. Four repeats of the rib is far too wide, so I'm doing three. I love the pattern all the same - the perfect balance between knitterly and unfussy.


I'm knitting it in an Irish yarn, Kilcarra Tweed, which has the most sumptuous colours, even if it is a little stiff. But that is one of the problems with pure wool, after all. I haven't seen Kilcarra in Dublin ever; I picked six balls of it up in a yarn shop in the little Cork town of Clonakilty last Easter. It feels good to be using a local yarn, and frustrating that Irish yarns are so ridiculously hard to get hold of. Which is why it felt so damned good to go out to visit the This is Knit stall at the Blackrock Market today.

I had heard good things of it from Aileen, and she was so right. The stall has a small but exquisitely chosen selection of luscious designer yarns, and Lisa and Jacqui were unbelievably friendly and enthusiastic and kind. Better yet, they have the same approach to knitting as mine: it was fab to talk to another Irish knitter who mostly learned off the internet after having produced a few dolls' blankets in primary school, who knew all about the patterns in the latest Knitty and Magknits, but who would prefer to knit them in local yarns, if possible; who is excited about socks and knows that most Irish knitters are likely to be only just learning to make them, and sources luxury foreign yarns while trying to track down local wool.

The knitting revival has only just taken off here, I think; only about five years ago, the last yarn shops in the centre of Dublin shut down, and an Irish Times article declared the craft of knitting dead in today's cash-rich-time-poor (bleech, horrible phrase) Celtic Tiger Ireland. As this article from 2004 shows, a few suburban shops struggled on, but knitting as a popular craft for young urban women had yet to take off. It's so fun to be able to hook up with people who are providing services and products for selfish knitters like me, who want to knit delicious stuff for themselves, not for babies. Hooray! I really, really hope that this means a revival in the fortunes of Irish sheep farmers, too, and that I can start buying locally produced yarns rather than buying imported goods from the big British craft empires.

Mind you, the new Irish knitting circle doesn't appear to be all that huge just yet... as soon as I put down my email address to be added to the This is Knit list, Lisa said, "Oh, you were living in Germany, weren't you! You took Aileen to the yarn shop in Kreuzberg!"

Yes. Ireland. About as large as a... not very large sheep farm, and Irish knitting bloggers are about as anonymous as sheep dyed luminous pink. Or something.

It would have been a sin to stroke all that lovely yarn without buying any, wouldn't it?



Lovely, lovely soy silk and merino mix yarn, destined for some handwarmers.



And some insanely soft alpaca silk in teal as a present for my lovely ladyfriend. She did get me that amazing yarn from Toronto, so it is only fair that she get something back, no?

Snickets!

I finished the Snicket socks! And don't they look gorgeous?



Pattern: Snicket, from Magknits.

Yarn: Schoeller and Stahl's Fortissima Colori, in colourway Turf, 75% wool 25% polyamide

Needles: 2.5 mm Addi metal double-pointed needles; 2 mm DPNs for the ribbing

Time sucked: A week, I think. Standard sock obsessive length...

Modifications: Ribbing done on 2mm needles; toes done with a Kitchener stitch finish, rather than a simple pixie-toe decrease.

Persnickety

Oooh, these were persnickety. Very, very much so. I tried using the useful cabling without a cable needle technique promised by so many websites, but at this tension, a cable needle is easier. Four sock needles AND a cable needle AND two extra for the heels? And yet... and yet... I do love them. And I did love knitting them, in a self-hating way. I also have a fair bit of that gorgeous subtle yarn left over, which makes me cross: these would have been gorgeous three inches longer. Motivation to learn toe-up knitting!

Best knitting in public experience yet

I was sitting on the Luas (the Dublin tram), fretting over a purl stitch on the cable needle as we zoomed over the Nine Arches at Milltown. My tongue was stuck out in unflattering concentration when I heard a voice:

"Miss one! Miss one!"

I looked up: it was the ticket inspector, gazing at my knitting in awe and wonder. "Oh - just wait till I've done this, and then I'll get my ticket out!" "Oh no no, please don't!" he said, panicked. "I wouldn't want to be held responsible for you missing a stitch! Keep knitting!" And he walked off.

I did have my ticket on me, because I am a Good Citizen. But this is a useful trick to remember for future necessity, no?

And in other news...

I am flying through the neck and waistbands for my Debbie Bliss biker jacket. Yes, yes, I know: a biker jacket in purple tweed is as silly as it gets. But it's pretty damn queer, isn't it, at least?



Here is a (slightly glorified) closeup of the body yarn (a vintage eBay alpaca/wool mix) and the darker neckband (in Tivoli luxury aran tweed). A tiny colour variation between the two, a bit like a Siamese cat: and then each yarn with its own gloriously bright flashes of primary colour. I am going to love wearing this.

terrible confession

Here is a thing I have not yet admitted to you yet. Well, I haven't really admitted to myself yet. Being home in Dublin means being home with a vast, extravagant stash, a squiggly sad frog pile... and also a shameful pile of unfinished objects. A huge one, I mean. I think that now is not the time to admit to its full horrors. I think that I will introduce you to my little UFOs, one at a time, so that you do not think too badly of me.

Yesterday saw me revisiting Dublin's dirty old city centre, now furiously piling on the expensive makeup as fast as she can muster. I was wandering around Henry Street, and thought, Why not just look at the sale table in Hickey's of Henry Street? They're more or less rubbish, but they are the only yarn shop in the city centre that ever stock wool yarns, and well. You never know.

And look! On that very same sale table, alongside scary giant 400g balls of acrylic yarn, was some absolutely gorgeous mixed-fibre Tivoli aran tweed...



which cunningly matches a UFO that I have sitting around at home, i.e. a Debbie Bliss pattern for a knitted tweed biker jacket. I know. I know. It's ridiculously silly. But I ordered this amazing alpaca/wool purple tweed yarn on eBay, and it just seemed right at the time.




Sadly, the yarn ran out before I could complete the whole jacket, but what remains to be knitted are the cuffs, neckband and waistband, which can be done in a contrasting colour. Originally, I thought I'd do them in Kureyon, for full-on boho craziness. But this yarn matches almost exactly, and is almost too close in colour - in some lights it looks almost identical to the original, in others about two shades darker. Now to hope, of course, that the jacket actually fits. I am not sure that I'm really a biker jacket person, and Debbie Bliss patterns, stupidly enough, do not have a schematic, so I'm not even sure of the shape.

***

Oh and by the way: that looks very like a respectable Snicket, doesn't it? Now for number two.



I am deriving ridiculous comfort from my Jaywalkers as the weather grows colder, and can't wait to own more handknitted socks. Yes, I have a sad, sad life. I know.

I Swore I Wouldn't Sock Again

Hello, all! My profile is telling you lies, first off. I am no longer in Berlin, home of Fadeninsel and myriad wild and wonderful knitting magazines: I am back home in Dublin, where there are huge numbers of sheep but strangely enough hardly any yarn shops. Work is crazy busy, as is trying to move my head from one of the most chilled and scruffy cities in Europe to one of the most commercial and hectic. Little time for knitting.

But - but - have you seen the new Magknits? The prettiest accessories ever! I was only browsing, I swear, and then I suddenly saw the prettiest socks ever: Snicket. Lovely, fancy socks that wree neither lacey (who wants woolen winter socks with holes in?) nor frou-frou: just a lovely simple-looking lace pattern. Simple-looking, that is.



This, now this is the heel, done in a new-to-me funky double-stitch method. ANYTHING to avoid the heel-flap picking-up-stitches vale of misery. ANYTHING. Even knitting on six, count them, needles with a seventh to boot AND - AND - at one stage - cabling every so often too. I didn't feel the rage quite as badly as when I was doing the heel-flap on the Jaywalkers, but I made horrendous mistakes. And yes, there is a weeny hole where the gusset joins the heel. Again.



Heel turned! I do think I like the look of it better than the heel-flap misery, nonetheless.



It looks like such a simple sweet pattern, but oh no: the twisted cabling, one stitch at a time, is deceptively tricky. No television-watching while knitting this one. It's worth the messing around, though - look at that gorgeous transition from the twisted rib to the lattice pattern! I'm not sure that the marled yarn I'm using shows the twists to their best advantage, but oh well.



And here is Snicket's leg, showing the gorgeous subtle, subtle transitions of the yarn. The designer says that the pattern is intended to mimick net sleeves, but I think that in this yarn (Fortissima/ Socka Colori, 75% wool 25% polyamide), whose colourway is after all called "Turf", the pattern looks more like an artefact that's been preserved in a peat bog: an ancient branch, perhaps, that shows its ring pattern when it's dug up, or perhaps even the half-erased half-uncials or leather tooled binding of a long-buried mediaeval psalter.

If one is to be fanciful about so mundane an object as socks. Which, it appears, is actually de rigeur, in the strange strange world that is internet sock knitting....

jaywalkers!

Look look LOOK! My first pair of socks! I did it! I finished them!


Pattern:Jaywalkers, from Magknits. (A name that makes no sense to me, I realise: in German, I don't think there's a word for jaywalking, because it is so taboo; in Ireland, by contrast, ignoring all lights and zebra crossings is so common that, again, it is just known as "crossing the road." I know I'm home when all the police jaywalk.)

Yarn: Regia 4-fädig Nation Color sock yarn, in colour 5399, 75% wool 25% polyamide

Needles: 2mm Addi metal double-pointed needles

Time sucked: A week. I knitted like a woman possessed. My fingers are falling off of me.

Whoa. It's not true, folks: socks are NOT easy. Particularly not for a reading knitter like me. You see, confession: I'm not a perfectionist knitter. I admire Eunny Jang's utter devotion to detail and process no end, but alas, I have to read while I knit. Or watch a film. Or talk. I can't be counting and watching all the time, my head would fall off with the boredom. So the socks are full of mistakes and wobbles, and many of them were not just learner mistakes, they were avoidable, but was I going to frog? On TINY needles? Hell no.

But look! Look at the gorgeous colourdiness of them! I particularly love their anarchic non-matchiness, and the teeny tiny tip of purple on the toe of one sock. So very cute.

Here are the heels, which caused me no end of grief. Not the turning so much as the picking up stitches: I tried two methods, one the one I knew already, which leaves a slight seam, and one a fancier method picking up slipped stitches, and neither was much fun and both caused sweating and misery and ugh, and there are still little holes in the corners of the gussets, which I'm not sure how best to avoid.



Yes, I do have a birthmark. And weak ankles, to boot.

Neelia is right: handmade socks feel completely different. It's almost as though they were tailored, not knitted: a perfect, stiff fit, tight to pull on and bulky to wear. I do like them, but do I have the bug? Not yet, I think. My hands are damned SORE. But I am kind of bursting with pride, I do have to admit.

I came, I saw... I jaywalked

Ow. Typing hurts. And whose fault is it? Mine, mine alone, of course. It was all supposed to be so innocent: I went down to Fadeninsel to get a set of double-pointed needles, or a Nadelspiel, as they are charmingly called in German. This time, I remembered to get youse a photo, even.



Look at all the bargain yarns and handknits in the windows!



I went in and asked for the needles. Already, I had become sucked in to the cultish world of socks, because I asked for 2mm; the internet says that it prefers a firm pair of socks, and I aim to do this right. And then, I saw the most fabulous, tacky, chain-store-coloured stripey sock yarn on very very cheap offer. And I fell, and tumbled.

I never really understood sock knitting, you see. I knit because it's a fun distraction, and because I like being able to knit gorgeous or silly stuff that I couldn't buy in the shops. Socks, you can buy anywhere. Plus, in the summer I wear sandals and in the winter I wear boots, and I don't have much opportunity for showing off fabulous lacey short-rowey goodness.

More, I am more than a little scared of the cultish devotion that sweeps sock knitters online. Knitty tells you, "Add a little zing to YOUR socks!", assuming that you knock out a pair a month at the very least; bloggers the web over state their hatred of toe-down, their devotion to short-row heels, their passion for Lorna's Laces (all very well if you live in the States), their hunger for new techniques, and good grief, they are just SOCKS. But the Regia Color yarn was so bright and cheery, and so very artificial and un-artisan, that I just had to try...



Jaywalker! And look! I turned the bloody heel! I TURNED it! It may or may not have involved tears, flinging the sock across the room, feverishly googling for instructions, aching fingers and passionate hatred, but... well, I must be hooked, because that's about 12 hours work, more or less solid. On 2mm needles, what's more. That sock isn't just firm, you could stir your coffee with it. I may be a heretic and go for 2.5mm needles next time, because my hands are about to fall off, and perhaps I don't mind having a slightly softer sock after all. That's just the kind of rebel I am.

hooray! MORE YARN!

Because that's just what I need, man. Yesterday, I met up with the lovely Neelia for the first time ever, for a high-powered fast-paced raid on Fadeninsel, the best yarn shop I have ever seen in Europe. Neelia was nearly overcome at the lusciousness of the yarns on display, but did recover a little when she realised the high acrylic content of most German designer yarns... I still haven't got a photo of Fadeninsel to show you, but I must do. It's a cute little shop in a funky, very Turkish neighbourhood, a shop run by sharp-eyed women who anticipate your needs before you've thought of them. Yesterday, the woman in charge was kind enough to speak (flawless) English to Neelia and switch to German when talking with me, which is an attention I liked. Usually, service personnel and many other Germans I encounter here either have no English at all, or are so pleased at the chance to practice their English on a native speaker that they don't let me speak German. But not in Fadeninsel!

I shall not report the extravagances of the lovely Neelia, but look what I got:



Sock yarn! I've never made socks before, but now may well be the time. The yarn on the left is going to be made into leafy embossed socks, because it's all autumnal and all, and the yarn on the right - bought on sale! - is going to be my learner pair. Neelia suggests Jaywalker for the pattern, but I'm not sure yet.

I also got the new Rebecca magazine:



and got inspired by this photo. I have all this báinín aran yarn sitting around in Ireland, and have never been convinced as to what to do with it. I always think of báinín jumpers as being similar to Celtic armband tattoos and Sinéad O'Connor, part of the Oirish cultural revival of the early nineties, and more than a bit embarassing now. But a funky waist-nipped aran, with a scoop neck instead of the one pictured, might be just the trick. Hmmm. I have two weeks to decide.

Talking of decisions:



My lovely girlfriend brought me back this Fleece Artist yarn from the most amazing yarn store I have ever seen, in Toronto. I am so lucky. It is just luscious: slubby and rich-coloured and hand-painted and thoroughly, thoroughly North American. I so want to do it justice: there's 750 grammes of it, more than enough for a garment, but which garment? I've never seen patterns for anything this thick, and I don't want to make something that looks like a cropped sleeping bag. Any suggestions very, very welcome.

hippy heatwave cami!

Whoops. Life caught up with me, and yes, not so much blogging happened. Which doesn't mean that I wasn't knitting, I was, it just wasn't very... bloggable. I have been futzing around on that silly baby dress for a month, and I still amn't at all motivated to finish it off. I really should.

But! I have been doing something that is much, much more exciting, viz: designing my own top! Sort of. Kind of. It's influenced by a) that monster box of cotton I scored off eBay b) Soleil c) the Prosperous Plum Tank. Also by a heatwave we had in Berlin, hence I am tentatively calling it the Hippy Heatwave Cami. The idea was a top with the curvy shaping of Soleil, but in a reasonably modest lace. And then I got mad and decided that two-tone contrasting laces was the way to go (this is the hippy bit.) A dull day at work produced the following, cough, kinda design:


No. I cannot draw. But I can get kinda obsessive about knitting once I get an idea in my head, and even in the 38 degree heat I kicked off:



And this is where I am now:



Of course, it is now no longer a heatwave, and an airy cotton vest suddenly seems much less appealing. But it might still be wearable as a going-out top, right?

I am particularly proud of my lace decreases in pattern:




Look! Up until the last couple, you wouldn't even notice those sections, right? The laces are Fern Leaf and Beech Leaf from the Knitter's Bible, a tribute, if you will.

I'm somewhat less happy about the sizing, though. It seems very, very small. Cotton lace DOES stretch something amazing, though, right? Even Soleil feels very baggy afte a few wears, and that's only stocking stitch, so lace should be even more accommodating? Ack. I thought I planned OK from my gauge swatch, but am now getting cold feet. Not so much that I would stop knitting it, of course.

intarsia, bet into submission

Look! Look look look! That looks like intarsia, doesn't it? Complete with... horrible dangly ends. But still! I beat it! Tatjana, you were right: being over-zealous with chopping the yarn into tiny pieces is the way to defeat and humiliation. I carried the yarn over three whole stitches in some cases, and nothing terrible happened. Mind you, it still looks babyish. But I guess that's the point.

Intarsia, I hate you

I had guests over the last week, and my knitting mojo was seriously damaged. But then, the wonders of eBay saved me, by delivering up a copy of The Knitter's Bible, by Claire Crompton. It's the anti-Stitch 'n' Bitch: crisp, no-nonsense instructions a bit like the admonishments at the back of Rowan knitting magazines ("It is a great shame that so many garments are ruined by poor seaming"). I think the cutesy writing of Debbie Stoller was just what I needed to get me past the first fear of knitting, but now that I really do believe that I can knit anything, if I put my mind to it, clear prose with detailed photos is exactly what I want.


And oh! It has the most wonderful stitch library, over 100 stitch patterns, and now my mind is running wild with notions about designing a lacey camisole, based on the Soleil shaping, mostly knitted in a simple eyelet pattern in a dull olive green cotton, with hot pink accents in a more elaborate lace. Exciting times. For fashion-obsessed knitters, that is.

***


First, though, I have a pile of baby clothes to get through. I was doing so well with the first Anouk, and whizzed through the back yesterday. So cute! So fluffy! I find it hard to believe that babies really are that small, but apparently they are. It was all going so well. And then, armed with the Knitter's Bible, I decided that nothing, no nothing held any fears for me any more: I would teach myself intarsia.

Horrible, horrible intarsia! With the sucky tension and dangly ends and tangly balls of yarn! And it looks dreadful at the front and even worse at the back:














Ghastly, gruesome vision! I have a nasty feeling the baby will feel mortally offended at being presented with such a grisly mess, to say nothing of its stylish mother. And you can't even frog intarsia, because all the ends are cut! I despair. I will finish the pocket, and think again, but perhaps I'll just lazy-daisy the dress and leave it at that. It's not like I'll ever want to use intarsia on a garment for myself, after all, and after all, whatever I pretend, my knitting is all about Me.

stitch markers

No new knitting for the moment, friends. I was whisking through the first Anouk, but then I sustained a sorry injury when I momentarily forgot the useful function of a chopping board, and am invalided out of the knitting world at the moment.

But I do have pretty pictures nonetheless! I got the dinkiest parcel from my friend Katie through the post, all full of sparkles and loveliness,
containing a gloriously anarchic selection of stitch markers.

Hooray! So pretty! No more elastics for me! If ever there was an inducement to start knitting MORE lace, this was it. Thank you so much, lovely!

Desert Princess Jacket. Or not?

FO: Desert princess ajour-patterned jacket

Pattern: from Verena magazine. (They don't go in for cutesy names in German knitting magazines)

Yarn: Schoeller and Stahl Scooter, colour 9857, 4 1/2 balls

Needles: 5mm circs, manufacturer unknown

Pattern modifications: I was supposed to pick up and knit ribbed sleeves on, but alas! the jacket has become vast enough as it is, and I suspect the human frame could not support its weight if I were to do so.

Time sucked: One week. Minus the arms

Lesson learned: Swatch more sternly in future. It is too big. It is just too big. Snacky little bolero, not so much. On the other hand, I learned something fascinating about shrug construction, viz: a shrug is just a square of fabric, turned into a tube. No wonder they are so popular!

I do love it, despite its vastness. I will try wearing it out tonight, perhaps, and we will see what happens. Anyone have opinions on the sleeves?

desert princess jacket down, thousands of Anouks to go

So there she is, my desert princess ajour jacket, blocking on the sofa. What do you mean, it looks like a giant carpet to you? Tsk! I should have included something to give you an idea of the scale, butcurrently it's pretty huge, about sixty by seventy centimetres. I'm not blocking it too severely, because it turned out a little larger than the pattern measurements state.Somehow, this huge floppy piece of heavy cotton is going to be transformed into that delicious little jacket. Do you believe it? I'm not quite sure.

And this is the lace blocking, close up. I do love the strong geometric pattern, and it wasn't at all hard to learn. I'm still a bit bewildered by the choice of yarn, though. Heavy cotton worsted-weight shaggy yarn for lace? I don't know.

*

Next up: the Anouks! And here is where the fun bit comes in. I have a whole paintbox full of pastel cotton yarns, and I get to decide which colour combinations go to which baby. One gets the hot turquoise and orange combo on a pale blue background, one gets the more gentle floral set that cunningly uses up the rest of my sock yarn. Or not? I have rose and olive to play with still, after all. Decisions, decisions. Fun decisions.

The sun has got her hat on

By which I mean, of course, Hurrah!

FO: Knitty's Soleil

Pattern: Soleil, from last spring's Knitty

Yarn: ggh Molina, 100% cotton, colour 05, 4.5 balls used (ca. 225 grammes)

Needles: 4 mm Addi Turbos

Pattern modifications: One extra repeat of lace along the bottom; edging on arms and neckline picked up and knit rather than crocheted, because, erm, I haven't learned to crochet. Yet. Yet!

Time sucked: About a week and a half, with a week's break in between.

What colour would you call this, then?

I'm intrigued by the yarn, rather than in love: it's soft and shiny and light, and the colours are aubergine, sky blue, turquoise, cream and mid-blue, all plied together. I thought, somehow, that when it knit up, the colours would resolve themselves, but even in a garment, they're as indetermined as ever.

I think I like this: it is, as I intended, a plain-ish, no-fireworks garment that I could even wear to an office. The fit is fabulous around the waist, perhaps a little matronly around the shoulders: if I were to knit it again, I'd decrease for the last six rows under the arms rather than increasing, and make the straps thinner. (Also, I would stand up straighter while being photographed. Good grief.)

But let us be honest with ourselves, friends: I'm not going to knit it again. Ever again. Never mind the slight mercy of the lacey edging (Felinity, it was indeed fun, though very, very easy.) Repeat to yourself over and over again, Glitz: No more stocking stitch garments, no no NO.

Oops, I laced it again

German knitting magazines are odd, odd things. You might know about Rebecca, the German knitting magazine that Debbie Stoller describes in Stitch and Bitch as being full of attractive Aryans frolicking on the beach, a snide but reasonably accurate description. Rebecca tends to simple-ish, classic designs that feature ggh yarns only, as it is the in-house magazine of the ggh yarn house. Rebecca also, I think, has a US edition, and hence an English-language following.

But there are others that are not translated, more obscure and considerably more mad. I am particularly fond of Verena, which is put out by Burda. Unlike Rebecca, Verena is not hampered by being bound to use the yarns of any one manufacturer; but still, I suppose, like any knitting magazine, it is bound to market the new yarns that are put on the market. And lord, the German market is absolutely full of crazy novelty yarns, in ever more unlikely combinations of synthetic fibres. Thus, Verena is half-full of creations like the one on the left, above, that feature more novelty yarns and plastic than you would have thought possible in one jumper, cost a fortune, and are of so astonishing a hideousness that they probably regularly feature on You Knit What? Presumably, the yarn manufacturers figure that, unless the wizards of Verena whip up a design featuring their latest crazy shiny sticky string, no-one in their right minds would buy it.

But then again, they also feature wonderful eccentric bohemian knits, the like of which you don't see elsewhere. So take, for example, the delicious little snacky jacket to the right, which, the blurb charmingly says, is designed for "desert princesses". Look at the gorgeous intricate lace! The plain-ish yarn! I have been ogling it for weeks, and yesterday... I fell. I didn't just fall into knitting yet ANOTHER lace project for myself, no; I felll into, for the first time ever, buying the original yarn specified for the project, at full price, Schoeller and Stahl's Scooter.

And lo, I suppose that the yarn manufacturers have a point, for I certainly would never have dreamed of buying this rather odd yarn otherwise: 64% cotton, 27% viscose, 9% polyamide (the colour is true in the photo of the ball, but not in the photo of the lace). It feels and looks a bit like carpet pile, with a golden shiny polyamide thread running through it, and whoever thought of designing a lace pattern with it? But I'm enjoying knitting it up, and, erm, have achieved quite a lot since yesterday. Whoops.

Thus, my friends, a double sin: not only have I not started knitting scrumptious little baby dresses with the cotton, as I said I would, but neither have I finished sewing Soleil. There is a reason for it, though: it needs to be finished with a crochet edging picked up and knit along the armholes, and no matter how I google, I cannot find instructions for how to do that. Perhaps I will have to give in and ask the Livejournal knitting community for advice; or perhaps I'll figure it out on my own somehow after all.