knitting neels

…It tolls for thee. Well, me, really – my midyear recital exam is next Monday. I was feeling ok about it until I woke up this morning. It starts like this, with the sweaty palms and palpatations. By Monday morning, I’ll be ready to jump off a cliff, crying, I swore the last time I’d never do this again! It’s pretty entertaining (in hindsight)(by Monday there will be no sight, just blind terror).

To take the edge off (and there’s been a lot of that, I swear my knitting’s covered in edge dust), I have been hacking away at the blue raglan.

If you peer closely, you’ll see the matching cabled raglan decreases behind the cuff. I meant to take a better picture, honestly. For some reason I’d thought that putting a cable into my raglan decreases would be really messy, but it’s not, and makes the knitting much more interesting. I decided not to put cabled decreases on the back for one reason: I like to be able to tell the back from the front when I’m putting a jumper on in a hurry. What can I say, I’m easily confused. So I’m doing matching double decreases for the back instead. Here is the left-slanting one (slip 1, k2tog, psso).

And here is the matching right-slanting one. I sort of made this one up to match but I’m pretty sure it’s been done before somewhere (ssk, put the ssk back on LH needle, pass the second stitch on the needle over it, put ssk back on RH needle and continue). I thought it might be messy, and even though it is fiddly to do, the result is quite pleasing and matches the other one well.

I was really going hell for leather once I got the sleeves joined to the body, but I’ve run out of wool now so I’m going to write to Yarn and ask them to dig out some more for me. Alb is coming up the weekend after this one so I’ll ask him nicely to pick it up for me and bring it with him (*bats eyelids*).

There has been a lot of going in and out to college in bad traffic recently, as well as a lot of waiting around for singers. Waiting time is directly proportional to sock growth!

After my exam next week, I have some competitions which always involve waiting around so I’m predicting a completed pair by next Friday! I picked up some extra work (work as in moneywork) accompanying a euphonium (Go on, click it. I didn’t know what it was either), which will help speed the pair to completion too 🙂

In other news, I tried in vain to order in some Barbara Walker books yesterday. I was a little disappointed but not very surprised, so I ordered Stefanie Japel’s Fitted Knits instead. I’m very interested to see it because I’ve read a lot of good things about it.

Ok, I have to play in my lesson later and I want to bake up some fresh fruit scones to bring my teacher. His wife just got out of hospital and when you’re feeling poorly, there’s really nothing better than a mug of tea with a fresh scone with jam. There may also be a small pear pie, depending on the amount of fat I’ve got left. Pictures to come!