Hello everyone. Hope everyone’s had a great weekend – maybe in the US it’s not over yet for you if you have Indigenous People’s Day off – I don’t so I’ll be back to work tomorrow. Since it’s Sunday, I’m blogging about my Year of Projects updates. YoP is a Ravelry group of bloggers who plan their projects for the year and then blog about them. You can find my plans here.
FYI, a little later in this post I do have a spoiler for the WestKnits MKAL – the slipstravaganza shawl. If you’re following along, feel free to skip this post!
I had a pretty good week, capped off by an awesome birthday celebration for my best friend/ roommate yesterday. We went over to my other friend’s house and had an awesome outdoor fall-themed feast with apple cider mules, pumpkin dip, turkey chili, apple crisp, and hot apple cider. It was such a great time. My friend is the last of us to turn 30, and even though 2020 has somewhat limited the 30th celebrations we can have, the important part is that we are together for it, which we have been able to do.
Project wise, a lot of work was done on the Plush Sweater test knit. I finished the right back and have 20 more rows on the left back. This construction is so cool, I really love how the brioche will be going horizontally across the sweater. The City Tweed is super soft and I love the combo of the dark maroon and tweed. I think this will be a really awesome sweater.
Since this is a test knit with a deadline, I wanted to be able to be sure I was finishing on time, and so I made a slight enhancement to my normal sweater knitting Excel template. I added a few formulas to first determine the average # of stitches per day I needed when I started the sweater. And then I created a moving average, so each day as I fill in how many stitches I completed, it will tell me the new # stitches per day that I need. My goal is to hit at least that moving average every day. You can see I’ve done pretty well, I’ve already reduced the # of stitches I need per day by almost 200. I seriously love the nerdiness of this!
| Overall | Moving Avg | |||
| Days | 52 | Days left | 41 | |
| Total | 68,952 | Total left | 48,590 | |
| St pr day goal | 1,326 | St pr day goal | 1,185 | |
| % per day goal | 1.9% | % per day goal | 1.7% |
I’m also working on the Slipstravaganza MKAL by Stephen West, the first clue of which was released Friday. Stephen West has NO CHILL (150 st icord cast on?!) but I’m really liking how this is looking so far. I went back on forth on my color choices a few times but I think my final choices will look cool. I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep up week to week, as my focus will continue to be on the sweater, but if I can hit that moving average stitch goal I’ll probably put in a little work on it each day.
The other project I’ve been working on is a baking challenge put together by my friend from knitting club. We’re doing Great British Bake Off “weeks” with a recipe selected by her each week. The first week was pistachio rasberry custard cremes, last week was Sticky Toffee Apple Caramel Cakes, and this week I get to make foccacia! I’ve never considered myself much of a baker, but this challenge has been fun to expand my skills. For cake week, I made cupcakes and basically made apple pie filling to put inside them, so I still did a bit of improv which is what I love about cooking and why I generally don’t really bake!
We’re definitely entering a time where there won’t be too much to blog about because I will just slowly and steadily be making progress in these two big WIPs. I guess that’s the problem with sweaters and 5 skein shawls lol! Have a good week everyone.