Saturday, December 3, 2011

New Beginnings

One of the highlights of the Knitter's Review Retreat is New Beginnings, when we each commit to a new project, one that hopefully will be completed in the upcoming year. Clara holds a short but solemn  ceremony of commitment, then we cast on and share our stitches and good wishes with the entire group.
For my New Beginning, I plan to knit Diamond, a very fine jacket in British designer Marion Foale's book Knitting Collection 1 (distributed by Unicorn Books). I bought the book and the Marion's own yarn at Tutto, a delightful little yarn shop in historic Santa Fe.
Now, I just might be a little nuts. The gauge on this sweater is 8.5 stitches/inch, which puts it tighter than most of the socks I knit. Given that I plan to add a few inches (two more buttons) to the body length, I figure that this jacket is equivalent to about ten (10) pairs of socks. In order to see some progress, I decided to start with one of the sleeves. The knitting you see above represents about an hour of knitting. At this point, all bets are off on whether I'll finish in time to wear it to the retreat next year.

4 comments:

eboston said...

Are you going to continue working though the Master Sock book socks as well as knitting this sweater? I am enjoying reading your knitting notes as you journey through the book.

Jamie Wang said...

I, too, am crazy. This year at Stitches West I bought the book and came back the next day to buy the yarn for Isobel (that's the jacket with a ruffle collar).

The only reason I even went by the booth was to meet Ali MacGraw (who was lovely and gracious, BTW) and get Foale's Ali hat kit.

The hat was finished within a week of Stitches.

The jacket has not yet been started.

Maybe I need to make a commitment like you have...

AdrieneJ said...

Wow, now THAT'S commitment! Take care of those hands... I suspect they'll need plenty of breaks knitting at such a fine gauge. I think it will be totally worth it, though. I've always loved those finely-knit garments!

NutmegOwl said...

Solemn ceremony? That was solemn? Talk about dry humor! At the pace you knit socks, I have no doubt this will be done before spring solstice.