Idyllic Chick

My stash practically doubled yesterday with the arrival of 8 skeins of Cacade 220 in a green heather color. I'll cast on with this for Rogue sometime this weekend. I had a helluva time swatching up Rogue. I started with the suggested size 8 needles, and my gauge was coming up just 1/4 of a stitch too much per inch. That doesn't sound like much, but when considering the entire circumference of a sweater, that small difference can turn into a 2 1/2 inch difference in the size of the garment. So I moved to a smaller size needle for my second swatch. Ahem. You knitters will quickly recognize that I should have moved to a *larger* needle to get fewer stitches per inch. I didn't catch on until my fairly large swatch was all knit up. Doh! I was dubious about knitting up the next swatch on larger needles because I don't want the stitches to be any looser than they are on the first one. So I was considering making a larger size sweater than I normally would to make up for the gauge difference. The good news is that after blocking, my original swatch came up with the perfect gauge. Saves me from one more swatch, and I'm ready to cast on for Rogue! With the tightening of the gauge, the stitches aren't nearly as loose, either. Hoorah for Cascade! Hoorah for Rogue!

I've also been messing around with the pink London Calling sweater. I started on the suggested size 9 needles, but the stitches were too tight for me. I want to wear this as a baggy sweater over a fitted tank top or cami top. I moved waaay up to size 13 needle, and it's just right now. Much more diaphanous, wouldn't you say? But these huge needles make me feel like I'm knitting with those fat first-grader pencils. I keep expecting my knitting to come out looking like that brown-ish paper with the wide blue lines on it. I was pondering getting some pink crystal beads to dangle along the cast on edge of the sweater, but I'm not sure if the kind of beads I have in mind would be heavy enough to keep the stockinette edge from curling up. If not, the beads would just be lost in the curl, and I'd have wasted my time and money. Any thoughts on that, knitting ladies?

Oh! And yesterday! Nandy and her mom and I went to the local yarn store to load the two of them up on goodies. Last weekend after S&B I went to Nandy's mom's house and taught them the basics of knitting. Well, I taught Nandy. Turns our Cris is an old school knitter (She's a total pit-knitter! Cool! Incidentally, no photos of pit knitters come up on a Google image search. Perhaps you can be the first, Cris! We'll make Google knitting history!) and really just needed someone to hand her a couple of sticks and some yarn. It's very hard for me to leave a yarn store empty handed, so I grabbed a couple of skeins of Jawoll self striping sock yarn. It's almost got sparklies in it. Almost.