Little Purl of the Orient

Stripey and the pre-terrible-two

Voila, Stripey Cardigan with the pink neckband and purple button band.

Yarn requirement: 2 balls pink variegated Jaeger Baby Merino DK, 1 ball each purple Jaeger Baby Merino DK, cream colour King Cole Anti-tickle yarn, blue Rowan Designer DK
Needles: Clover size 7 (4.2 mm) for body and Clover size 5 (3.6mm) for borders
Pattern: This Japanese pattern book

Before leaving for JY's school Christmas concert this morning (which was great), I sewed up the buttons and tried to get Miss CY to model the cardigan for some photos. She put on the cardigan without much protest but refused to change out of her pajamas pants. So there's a struggle as mummy is running out of time and if I don't get the photos today, I've got to wait until this weekend, by which time, we would be in Singapore. So out came the baby lotion which diverted her attention from the pants but still no smile from her, 'mummy is so bad', she must be thinking. Imagine that in July, she's a pliable adorable little baby who willingly wore her pink baby dress with a nice, big smile and now I have to negotiate with her. The 'terrible twos' has come early.

This evening I came home from the office with two lovely parcels waiting for me! I can't stop smiling, will talk about them later. Thank you, thank you! Got to take some pictures tomorrow morning.

Almost Stripey

I've been procrastinating the finishing of CY's stripey cardigan. All the knitting is done save the neckband and button bands. Just that picking up stitches and sewing the set-in sleeves just don't appeal to me right now. I've got one more sleeve to sew in. Moreover, I'm running out of the main pink colour yarn.

What should I do? I had wanted to knit the button bands first, then pick up the neck band all in pink. With just so much pink yarn left, I'm thinking of using the remaining pink to knit the neckband so that it'll match with the bottom band and use one of the other three colours for the button bands. How about purple? Or should I use the off-white?

Right Front

I interrupt the knitting of the cable sweater to bring to you the right front of Chung Yi's stripey cardigan. So I stuck with the colour combination of pink, purple, blue and cream, and got a bit of progress. I've decided to knit the fronts and back all in one piece and divide at the armhole so as to avoid sewing up and most important of all, ends. Like this, I have only one side with ends to weave in instead of three. This knitting is brainless enough and more so is the knitter. I got the number of stitches for this completed front wrong and realised only when I'm left with a couple of stitches too few for the shoulders. Guess what I'm going to do? Please don't do this at home though. I'm going to fudge around the armhole and re-distribute the stitches for the back and left front. Please turn a blind eye to it.

There's still half a sleeve to go for the cable sweater and I'd planned to finish up yesterday morning while waiting for Ji Yuan to have her ballet class. Then I remembered that it was open day and we could go peep into her class. My husband got to work so I was entrusted the job of capturing her in action. So I was armed with video camera on one hand and digital camera on the other. As a result, the photos turned out blurry. This is a better one, so you can imagine how bad the rest are.

Bus Knitting

My regular projects (namely, cable sweater and Delta) are the stay-at-home type done on straight needles, plus the denim dye for Delta runs so I can only knit it at home. I need something that's portable and brainless to knit during the commute to and from work hence I started knitting a stripy cardigan for Chung Yi using the odd balls of DK weight yarn I have.

Up till now, I'm still undecided as to whether I like this colour combination. The main colour will be the pink variegated Jaeger Baby Merino recycled from Chung Yi's old cardigan which she wore once and promptly outgrew. The other colours are purple, blue and cream. I had intended to tie the ripped out pink yarn in hanks and give them a good wash but ended up with bundles of yarn. So I simply wound them into balls and you can see that the pink part is especially kinky when knitted up. Hope that a good wash and block after completion will smooth things out.

I'm using the stripe combination for a boy's sweater from this Japanese pattern book which has lots of adorable knits. Here are the pictures of the said patterns and I'm going to knit a round-neck cardigan instead. The right side photo shows a close up of the stripe sequence. Notice that the rows just before and after the colour change are in moss stitch instead of stockinette so that the purl bumps accent the colour changes. I like that design feature.