Knitting's in Progress!

Oh yeah, this is a knitting blog, isn't it?

With my move getting closer and my need to pack looming larger and larger over my head, I've picked up the needles again to procrastinate and decompress. It's a sad, but true, fact that most of my knitting gets done this way.

I picked up some Sugar n Cream cotton from Michael's the other day, intending to make washcloths. However, the variegated yarn seemed suited for entrelac, which didn't work well as a washcloth, having a wrong side, and all. But I do have a very practical, though slightly dull, navy loveseat that needed some adornment, so a pillow it was. I was also determined to do it in the round. I'd never done entrelac before, but I used this tutorial to figure out the basics and make swatch and this one to work out the mechanics of doing it in the round. It's one of those things that you really have to try to get your head around it, and it's so much easier than it looks.

The pillow is working up to be much larger than I thought it would, and I need to buy more yarn. I bought three balls originally, but one is of a different dyelot, so I'll exchange it and buy more. I estimate that one pillow will take 4.5 balls of yarn and I think I want to make two pillows. Good thing this stuff is cheap! I should have bought more when it was on sale last week for $1/ball. Oh well.

The stats:
Pattern: My own- 14 entrelac repeats of 8 stitches each.
Yarn: Lily's Sugar n Cream in Summer Splash.
Needles: Size 5 Denise Interchangables


Progress so far:

It's a beautiful sunny day, so I ran outside to take the photos, but only for a minute, because it was close to 110 degrees today, and I started sweating as soon as I stepped out of the door. The colors are slightly muted in real life, and there's more contrast with the green.

And here's a close-up:

You can tell in this pic that my ssks are a bit wonky. There's just no perfect way to do that decrease (for me, anyway), and the cotton shows every last detail. I hope this will straighten out a bit when it's blocked.

I used a provisional cast on, mainly because I want to kitchener both the bottom and top so they're symmetrical, and it was a good opportunity to learn something else new. Surprisingly, it wasn't as hard as it seemed to be the last time I tried it, and I used the same Knitty tutorial.

I don't know what I'm going to stuff it with. I'd like to get a pillow form, but I'm afraid I won't find one the right size. I might just pick up a big thing of stuffing. At least I purposefully knit quite tightly. Also, I'm thinking of knitting a swatch and attempting to stain it with tea to mute it a bit more, as the colors are a little bright for my taste.