One of my rare forays into grown up knitting this week with Pat Menchini's A Little Luxury project from issue 70 of Knit Today. This was also a big knit for me with no fewer than five balls of King Cole Merino Blend Chunky and three balls of King Cole Luxury Mohair.
The magazine used Eucalyptus in the chunky and Montreux in the mohair. That was a bit, well beige, for my taste so I opted for the French Navy with Roma for a nice variegated blue effect.
The shrug is knitted in two halves on 9mm needles using the chunky and the mohair held together. Each half comprised six repeats of an 18 row x 40 stitches pattern. As it was kind of challenging, I limited myself to one pattern repeat per day.
The thing I found most tricky was the cables - I haven't done many and find it challenging to keep hold of the cable needle. I was also perturbed to find holes in the back of the work. I looked this up online and apparently, this is perfectly normal. On close inspection, I even found holes in my shop-bought cabled cardigan. I did read some stuff about how you could avoid the holes by twisting this or knitting into the back of that, but decided if you were meant to do such a thing it would say so in the pattern.
With the odd gained and lost stitch, I finally got to the end with something that vaguely resembled the magazine picture. I weaved my ends in carefully (I've discovered recently that I'm very sloppy with my weaving in and ends keep popping out on things that get a lot of use). I then mattress stitched the two halves together and tried it on. Not sure I look much like the model in the magazine but it definitely looks like a shrug.
One thing I really liked about the project was that I could tell early on that I wasn't going to run out of yarn. Indeed, I had a reasonable amount of both the chunky and the mohair left. I liked using them together so much that I made this little pouch with 15 stitches of 5 x 5 x 5 rib on 8mm needles. I used a lovely ceramic Injabulo hedgehog button with a crochet chain to fasten the pouch.
So, I feel like I've pushed myself a little bit on this project, but perhaps not quite enough to be contemplating knitting a sweater any time soon...
Melx
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