Trying Something New

No Saturday Sky picture this time; the weekend was mostly hectic, with lots of running around & a couple special events. I simply didn't get around to taking any sky pictures on Saturday the 9th of February.


That's just as well, seeing as having a Saturday Sky picture last weekend gave me an excuse to just post a picture & I never got around to a knitting update. So here is a belated picture of my Fjellros progress as of the 3rd of February. I got as far as the beginning neck row & froze, trying to decide which way to proceed after binding off for the front neck stitches.

Because that partial pale blue/periwinkle ball is all that I have left of that color, I very nearly let that be an excuse for switching to plain purple for the top of the sweater. After the stitches are bound off for the bottom of the front neck opening, the remainder of the sweater body is knit back & forth. So once I reached that point, I put the sweater down for almost a week while I considered what to do next. (Which perhaps gives a GIANT clue as to how & why I end up with so many Works-In-Progress going at once.)

This past weekend I did manage to find time for knitting after things had mostly quieted down on Sunday. I had enough "alone time" to be able to concentrate & finally I got up the nerve to try a technique which I don't think I've ever done before. (Rather timely, in fact, because I think there was a podcast in Sticks & Strings last series about trying new techniques.)

Purling in two colors was not as scary or as difficult as I thought it might be. It was definitely a bit tedious & slower than knitting in two colors. The worst thing about it, though, is that it tangled the yarn strands something fierce because I frequently had to cross them to pick up the correct color for the next stitch.
I finished the more complicated part of the stranded purling while my younger kids were away, but still had a couple of rows of the simpler pink/purple pattern to go after they got home. My daughter took this picture for me, which shows how I used the needle to select whichever strand I needed for the next purl stitch. Besides the tangling of the strands, I also needed to drop the yarns & re-tension fairly frequently, especially on the rows where one color was used much more often than the other color.

I highly recommend having the color pattern pretty much memorized before trying to purl it, because it helped tremendously not to have to constantly turn my work over to figure out where I was. I was glad that I switched the order of the charts from the way that the pattern had it for children's sizes. If I had done the body in the flower pattern only, rather than alternating in the sleeve pattern, I don't think I'd have done nearly so well on the two-color purling. Having nearly finished both sleeves meant that I had this particular chart firmly fixed in my head.