Right now I should be doing my weekly review and getting on top of my to do list, because I know there are important things I should be doing. But I don’t even want to look at my to do list so instead I am procrastinating very productively by knitting on a poncho for Adrian. It’s nice, easy, soothing stocking stitch in a soft woolen yarn, and this early in the project there’s no fitting or adjusting to be done, so it’s all pure pleasure.

Adrian wants a knitted poncho. He had one, which he outgrew, and then another one which he also outgrew, and now I can’t find anything remotely suitable in his size. So I’ll try and knit one. I haven’t had great success with my more advanced knitting projects but a simple poncho, with a simple shape, should be the right kind of project for me.

He asked for green and blue and maybe some more colours and a snowflake pattern. I’m thinking green for the bottom half and blue for the top, and a pixelated gradient between the two, and white snowflakes on the blue.

Challenge 1: all the snowflake patterns I find are for eight-armed snowflakes, which are easy to design but not what snowflakes look like. I want anatomically correct snowflakes, more or less. Finally I found a second-hand sweater for sale on an auction site, that had six-armed snowflakes on it. The photos were sharp enough for me to copy the pattern from them. Yay!

Challenge 2: none of the pixelated gradient patterns I found look like what I want. They have a bit of a gradient but the actual transition from one colour to another is too sudden. I want something softer. I may have to make my own pattern for that.

Still working on the cardigan.

That cardigan I started some years ago? It failed. Despite my calculations and gauge swatches, it came out too small so I ripped it all up when I was well over halfway. Then I was so disappointed and annoyed with the whole project that I put it away for a long time. Now I feel up to a new attempt.

Since the swatches didn’t help me get the sizing right, I simply made three starts this time, varying some parameter each time.

The first one is the same size as my first attempt, and with the same needle size, but I tried to knit more loosely.
The second one is the next size up, keeping the same needle size and yarn tension. (Can’t be 100% sure about the tension but I think I kind of remember.)
The third one is the same size and same yarn tension, but with thicker needles.

And to complicate things, I’ve switched the type of needle I use, because I discovered that I like stainless steel much better than aluminium.

I’m not sure if this helped at all. They all feel roughly the same size, except the one that I thought would be smallest (small size, small needles, looser knitting) is a bit larger than the others. But it’s very hard to measure large, curved, floppy things, and also hard try on a small piece of a cardigan that barely covers my shoulders. None of them feels too small, at least.

It may be that I can pick any one of these three and keep going and it’ll be fine. Or maybe it’s not possible to judge the size this early in the project and the result will turn out too small or too large anyway. I have no idea where this will end up.

I guess I’ll pick one and keep going. And if this attempt also goes wrong, then I might simply give up on this project.

Ingrid finished the scarf she was knitting and immediately wanted to knit some more. So now she has advanced to mittens.

I introduced her to knitting a year or two ago but she never got beyond the basics and didn’t really get hooked. Now she is definitely hooked, already thinking of what she could knit after the mittens are done.

I remember knitting lots at when I was about the same age as she is now. Mostly mittens and socks of leftover yarns. I might still have a pair of those socks somewhere.

Ingrid is knitting a scarf and I am making another attempt at the cardigan that failed a few years ago. So Adrian decided to try out knitting as well.

It is hard, because he doesn’t really understand how it works, how the yarn accumulates and makes up the knitting. So he is following rules but doesn’t understand why they work. It’s like when he was learning to tie simple overhand knots – he understood that the ends of the rope must cross each other and then one must come through, but it took him a good while to understand that the ends were not equal, that it mattered which one to bring through – that one makes a knot and the other has no effect.

Ingrid on the other hand actually understands knitting now. She can see if things look right or wrong. She knows which way to continue if she puts her work down in the middle of a row. She can notice a slipped stitch and even pick one up.

Knitting a scarf.

Those gloves for Adrian are more effort than I expected. This was my third attempt at knitting the fingers, and for the third time I ended up ripping them up. Too narrow, still too narrow, then too wide… knitting for small fingers with a thickish yarn, there is no margin of error. On the plus side, re-doing the fingers isn’t much work, because they are so small.

Adrian has been asking for fingerless gloves for a long time – since last winter I believe. I haven’t seen any in shops. Maybe I could find something online, but he also has very specific wishes regarding the gloves, so I decided to knit a pair for him.

Plus, I want to knit something anyway. I have the cardigan project that I spent so much time on and then had to rip up because it didn’t fit… and while I do want that cardigan, I feel a resistance. What if it won’t fit this time either? Maybe I should pick a different pattern? It’s easier to work up my courage with a small and simple project first.

Adrian picked the yarn. A variegated one, with blue, red and dark yellow. It’s woolly and warm and soft, but it doesn’t look that way when I see it up close like in this photo. It looks all scratchy.

I picked up my knitting project after a few weeks’ break. I was doing this without a pattern, and thought I remembered exactly what I was supposed to be doing. But simply trusting my memory was clearly a mistake. Now I have to unpick all that cable twisting the wrong way.