Sweating Over A New Project : WIP

While I’m waiting to find and obtain the right size needles to finish Jenny’s new hat, I’ve started on another project.  This one is a sweater for our daughter’s partner, using the sweater part of His’n’Hers from The Family Knitting Book, the edition which was published exclusively for W H Smith.  As I’m having to make this in black and white (mostly black), I’m discovering why my Mother hated knitting in black!  It’s fine in natural light but horrendous in artificial!  As I knit mostly at home in artificial light, it’s a real challenge.  Most of the time, I can’t see the stitches on the needles properly.  If desperate, I use one of those little battery operated LED lights that stick up on walls but that’s still not as good as natural light.

His'n'Hers

The pattern calls for double knit (8-ply/DK) yarn, the first 24 rows knitted on 3mm needles and the rest on 3¾mm needles.  That’s challenging too, especially using black yarn!  It’s quite difficult to make the transition back to DK from chunky  The sweater is in a rib pattern throughout, which is rather mind numbing too.  The real “feature” is the stripes pattern at the top, which I’ll be doing in white.

So far, since Saturday, I’ve gotten the starting rib (on 3mm) of the back done and have finally started on the main body (on 3¾mm).  During all that time, I only had about an hour (in total) of knitting in natural light, hence the painfully slow progress.

 

Paul's Sweater - WIP01

 

This could be a very long project!