Ta Da!

I wore my Welt and Rib Raglan to work yesterday and received rave reviews:


This is definitely my most wearable sweater to date. I used KnitPicks Swish DK, a superwash merino, which was already soft when I was knitting with it and got even softer after I washed it. I think it's going to pill a bit, but that's alright. Overall, I really liked working with this yarn, and I think it would be especially good for baby projects. My one complaint is that every ball had a knot in it. If I were just using plain wool, this wouldn't bug me that much because I could just splice it back together. With the superwash though, it left me a lot of ends to work with. *sigh*

So here's the details:

Pattern: Welt and Rib Raglan from Winter '08 Knits magazine
Yarn: Knit Picks Superwash DK in lemongrass heather
Skeins: 13
Needles: US3 - I had to go down a couple sizes to get gauge.
Mods: The major thing I changed was the neck. I think my stitch gauge was probably still a bit off (I didn't really check), so my neck came out all big and weird looking. The picture with the pattern shows a cowl/turtleneck and mine looked nothing like it. I ripped it back, did some drastic decreasing, knit an inch or so of garter stitch and came up with a boat neck of sorts. I'm happy with how it turned out. I also added more garter stitch rows to the bottom. The pattern calls for 7 rows, which was still curling up like crazy. I did about 2 inches of garter stitch.

...

Last week I made Thin Mints from Super Natural Cooking. They were delicious! The cookbook is really great - all the recipes have things like whole grains and minimally processed ingredients. Of course, I chose the least healthy recipe to try out first! I managed to remember to take a picture of them in progress:


But I never got around to taking a picture of the finished product. Now they're all gone. They were that good.

I also finished my Welt and Rib Raglan after reknitting the neck and bottom edge a couple times. My photographer is at work and my self-timer skills are severely lacking. Here's a little evidence/teaser though:

I promise that better photos and a full review are coming soon. For now, I'm going to enjoy my cozy sweater during what I hope is our last snowfall of the winter.