Adapt and Adjust

Been itching to get something substantial on the needles for a while.

I really thought it was going to be a Cali project, as I’d been really focused on spinning her fleece for a while now, and have almost 800 yards of 3 ply DK-ish weight yarn finished.

So I’d been hunting for a pattern. I have so many “favorites” saved on Ravelry, and checked through them for inspiration, but nothing was striking me quite the right way. After much browsing, I finally decided that I was in the mood to do a loose-fitting, solid color vest with a traveling, twisted stitch pattern- for a cable-y effect without as much bulk. And this seemed to fit the bill

There wasn’t much pattern info in Ravelry, but I bought it anyway, since I’d finally found a photo that looked like what I wanted to make. And upon downloading the PDF, I found that it is entirely written out line by line instructions. Not a chart in sight.

Ugh.

Not entirely unexpected. But Ugh.

I know there are people out there who prefer written out directions. But I guess I’m more of a visual learner. And since I knit backwards, conversion of these instructions to something that I can work from directly is a bit of a challenge.

At first, I thought that the answer was to make my own charts from the directions. But in order to do that, I had to try and think like a right-handed knitter. What does T2B or C2B mean to a person working from right to left, rather than left-to right? Made my brain tired, so I set it aside to let me unconscious mind work on it.

And once I stepped back from it a bit, it came into better focus.

I realized that, with the help of the photo, which thankfully shows all the different patterns in their entirety, after carefully casting on to the specified counts, placing markers and doing the first (set-up) row, I could ignore most of the written details, and use the photo for most of the cues about which way the twisted stitches are travelling, and where they are crossing.

I swatched with my Cali yarn, but it turned out that the yarn was a bit to light to get the desired gauge. But thankfully, I had just the thing in the stash, waiting to become a garment! Griff to the rescue!

Now that I’m through a couple of repeats of each pattern, I feel like I’m cruising. And I’m relived to have something on the needles that I can just pick up and work on.

So now I find my mind wandering to different types of necklines/collars. The crewneck isn’t bad, but would v-neck be better and most versatile? or even a shawl collar? Hmmm.

And an update on the lanolin experiment- Found info online about refining lanolin and applied it to my tiny sample

It did separate as they said it would- we’ve got olive oil on top, lanolin in the middle and dirty water below. But now my challenge is figuring out how to get the lanolin out of the middle layer without losing most of it. Haven’t been able to find any guidance on that step yet. My current thought is that perhaps if I freeze it it will be more manageable.

Have a good week-