Knitting photos

A new use for garden furniture:

 This is DH's new sweater drying in the shade in garden.  I don't have a sweater dryer but our garden furniture is made our of a coated mesh, which works beautifully. 

The body of the Willow jumper, knitted in the round:

The sleeves at 39cm/15.5 inches, knitted in the round, two at at time, using magic loop:

(No idea why these two photos are such different colours - they were taken seconds apart in exactly the same place without the use of the flash.)

Only once before have I ever tried to knit sleeves two at a time and that was just a couple of inches on a jumper my sister had started but fallen out of love with.  I hated it.  The stitches were crammed on the needle (she was using 14 inch straights) and the two balls of yarn kept tangling.  It put me off for at least 30 years.  However, I was listening to the Knitmore Girls and Jasmin kept singing the praises of knitting sleeves in the round, two at a time using magic loop, so I thought I'd give it a go.  After all, what could be better than a) sleeves that are identical in both length and increases, and b) no seams to sew? 

Apart from a bit of pfaffing around setting it all up on the needle, I'm a convert.  Without any effort, the yarn isn't tangling.  Even my annoyance has worn off at having to regularly slide things around the needle.  I'm particularly proud of the sleeve "seams".

Thanks to a class I took with Annie Modesit, I knew how to do left leaning and right leaning increases in the knit stitch, but it took a minute or two to work out how to do them purlwise. 

- Pam