Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

I’m not working on anything green, but hopefully a green background for the occasion will suffice? Although, I suppose you can’t see much of it!

I’m still working on Vivian. Slow and steady wins the race, right? I’ve gotten through one ball of yarn and although I’m not quite up to where the directions said to start on the sleeves, I started them anyway. I’d rather leave the body incomplete and start the sleeves with a fresh ball of yarn than have a mostly-full skein attached to my body piece, laying dormant. This is entirely a personal quirk, but with a cat around unfortunate things can happen to yarn that is just lying around.

Cabling is a curious beast. They take up more yarn than stockinette and yet take up a smaller space. This particular yarn also has a very strong relief. The relief is what creates the beautiful dimensions and shadows, but a deeper relief takes up less room than a shallow one. This sleeve looks like a sweater for a snake, but I keep trying it on and it fits just fine! Have no fear. That’s the nice thing about knitting – it stretches. For this particular pattern the sleeves are worked in the round. I’ve moved my body onto scrap yarn for the time being, and using the same needles in a magic-loop technique for the sleeves. Again, it’s entirely a personal decision. Mine is entirely based on availability. I do not have size 8 double points, so I make do with the needles that I have.

And the body. I focused the picture on the center back, since that is where my additional cables are. I am loving these cables immensely. As you can see, the center section is seed stitch. What you might not see is when the cables became 2 stitches apart I started purling those two stitches exclusively. The outer two stitch borders are still seed stitch.

As an aside, I can’t ever seem to photograph this blue to it’s true nature. The best way I can describe it, it’s like a sapphire chunk that has just been mined and hasn’t yet been polished: saturated, still dull, but none the less vivacious.

Stats:
Body progress: Row 108
Sleeves progress: Round 64