All The Love has launched

​So yesterday I gave into my yarn craving and cast on All The Love using my birthday yarn, Manos del Uruguay Silk Blend.  The color of Cactus Flower wasn’t quite the lipstick pink I was expecting but it’s still very pink and that’s what I was looking for. I got about 6 rows in and somehow had the wrong number of stitches so the directions didn’t match and I got frustrated and put it down. I looked for pattern corrections, downloaded the latest copy of the directions, but it still was the same instructions. I went back and couldn’t figure out where I had gone wrong but worked out how to fudge it so I would be back on track going forward. After that hurdle, I made swift progress on the back of the sweater.  I’m at about 2” of a 6” stretch of lace patterned knitting. 

Jo’s sweater is up to the sleeve cast on, so I have the dreaded ridged upper section to work. It also means that sweater is close to done. That’s a project that can travel as it’s only a 4 row repeat of knit and purl, whereas All The Love has lace patterns on both sides of the front and back and I don’t dare work on it without sitting still with my pattern flash cards keeping my place. 

I am also still working on spinning my Blue-Faced Leicester wool.  It’s slow going now that I’m down to the point where I split the top in half so I could spin the rest of it onto my 2 bobbins evenly.  I thought I was almost done, but I don’t seem to be getting any closer as I work thru the fiber.  I signed up for Craftsy again for this year when I got an email offering the year for $2 again. I wanted to finish watching the videos on spinning that they had available but I didn’t get thru before my last subscription expired on Christmas. I also got a video and several books from the library to look thru. The yarn has too much twist I think, but I’m not sure how to fix that besides drafting faster or treadling slower, both of which are difficult to do, as they are muscle memory at this point. 

Since I’m awake at this ungodly hour on my vacation and apparently slept in my contacts, I might as well get up and start knitting.  We have an 11am reservation for Korean BBQ, but other than that my day is clear. I would like to get to at least 6” on my sweater today.