Finished Kepler!!!

I had to wait till today to get some daytime shots, but here it is – my finished Kepler.

Project Stats

Pattern: Kepler by Fathom Harvill

Yarn: Mission Falls 1824 wool, colour 021 – Denim (blue/teal). 12 balls.

Date of Yarn Purchase: September 9, 2006

Completion Date: August 12, 2007

Modifications: Many!

The pattern calls for a guage of 16 stitches in 4 inches. I fell in love with this yarn and decided I could make it work with a different gauge. This required some thinking and the sweater sat thinking to itself in a box for a long period over the winter. I decided I would finish it during the Tour de France this year, so it became a full time project and was done really fast.

The first major modification was to knit the sweater in the round. I kit the cable bands, then grafted the bands into circles and knit up from there, be it the sleeve or the body.

See the grafting?

Then I added bust shaping for the first time ever. I think I’m a convert, but I think I might have added too much!

Last, to shape the sleeves and the armholes, I had to resort to Ann Budd’s Handy Book of Sweater Patterns for the basic shape – my gauge didn’t match any of the given ones in there either!

In the end, I should probably describe this as “inspired by the Kepler Pattern”, but I like it so much. Now I just need the weather to cool off.

Again, D gets a really good picture when I’m not ready yet – removing cat hair….

Now I can start my honeymoon vest – a fully me designed project. Any hints on how to add bust shaping in a 4 row pattern repeat??

In non-knitting news, I got back on the bikes in the past few days. For the first time in 3 years I got on my mountain bike. I’d forgotten how much fun whipping down trails can be. It’s a lot more inefficient than the road bike, but it’s a completely different type of biking. I biked to school today, good to be back into that groove.

I’ve been knitting!

This is that elusive post – the one about knitting.

I’ve been busy, but I haven’t had a good camera session in a while. I’ve been working on a modified Kepler – Instead of the suggest 4 st/in, I was using 4.25 st/in, resulting in some serious reworking. Also, I did the knitting in the round to reduce seams and I added bust shaping, which I’ve never done before. In the end, I borrowed the knitter’s handy sweater pattern book by Ann Budd and used it to shape the sleeves and arm holes, but even then I modified that as my gauge was slightly different than any of the suggested ones. Hopefully the sewing will go easily and I will have another thing off my needles. I bought the yarn for this on September 9th, 2006 so it’s been a slog – I did do D’s Durrow and several other little things in the meantime.

I’ m trying to tuck the top of the sleeve into my bra strap to hold it up to give an impression of what it’s going to look like. I think it’s going to turn out well. Gotta love D taking the best picture when I wasn’t even posing.

Since the Kepler was off the needles, I needed another project to take to the cottage, so I picked up the clapotis in Colourmart Cashmere. MMM. I can’t wait to wash this and have it fluff up. Should be really snuggly for the winter. I don’t have an accurate enough balance to determine how much yarn I’ve used, but I’ll just wing it – the cone doesn’t look any smaller yet! I have done 6 repeats of the straight section, so I think I’ll have to do more than the pattern calls for, but I’m using 3 mm needles and much finer yarn than called for so this is going to be completely different. I had problems getting this to come up well in a picture – it’s a lovely rich plum.  Daylight next time I think.

Finally we have Fred. Can’t have knitting content without cat content right? Fred and Ginger have a neighbour who comes to feed them and play with them while we go away to cottages etc. Twice in the past month, the neighbour has had to call a locksmith to get into our house due to random incidents. The lovely neighbour will not take our money so I think I’m going to have another knitting project on the go in the near future.