CatsEye has made a team GB Olympic Knitting button in two sizes! I am really spoiled for choice now.

I finally sat down with the calculator this afternoon and did a swatch for the patchwork jumper:

I’m very pleased with it, I think the needle size is right and I like the colours together, and I think it is about the right size. I am planning to wash it before I get too carried away since I want to make sure it wont shrink in the wash. I am feeling very virtuous now, since I think that is pretty much all my training done and I still have time to spare before the start date! I still haven’t totally worked out how I am going to increase for the sleeves yet though, or worked out the joining of the sleeves to the body, I am hoping that these little details will either come to me in a dream or will make themselves obvious once the knitting has started – one can hope!

The finishing up of other bits and pieces is going quite well too. The car went in for its service on Friday so I had about 3 hours sitting around in the garage knitting. I will take some photos soon.

Katie put a link in her blog to some team buttons for the Knitting Olympics and they are just fantastic, designed by JenLa. The only difficulty is there are two different GB buttons, and they are both great.

So now the really difficult decision: which one to put on my sidebar?

I haven’t started my Olympic swatching yet. I thought it might be sensible to finish off a few bits and pieces first. I tend to get a bit overwhelmed when I have too many different projects on the needles at once, as I forget what I was doing with each of them. So I think the next couple of weeks will be spent in the tidy up before the serious swatching begins!

Stephanie has had the marvellous idea to host a Knitting Olympics, the idea being that you pick a project which will be a challenge to you, then cast on during the opening ceremony on February 10th and if you finish before the closing ceremony on February 26th then you get a shiny button for your blog.

I think I am just about crackers enough to try this, and it is the closest I shall ever come to being an Olympic anything, so I will be giving it a try.

My Olympic Project

I will be knitting a patchwork jumper (sweater for those on the other side of the pond) a la Horst Schulz, which I will be designing as I go along. It is the first time I have knitted a garment of that size and complexity using this technique. I have knitted a camisole before, but that didn’t require much shaping, and other than that I have only done samples.

The yarn I’m going to use has been sitting in my stash for a while. The background is cotton in different shades of blue, and the foreground is acrylic turquoise fluff 🙂

I am off to sign up now, and contemplate just how mad this is … I think a few swatches will definitely be in order before the start date.

I seem to get round to jumping on band wagons at about the same time everyone else is climbing off, as is probably the way with the curly whirly scarf. Everyone seemed to be making them a couple of months ago, so I have just got round to making mine 🙂 and here it is, all apologies for my lack of any artistic photography, so I bring you:
Over the back of the chair:

Curled up on the seat of the settee:
and finally as modelled by Percy the Penguin (although black penguin on dark brown settee seems to cause difficulties for my camera):
This is the pattern from Get Knitted, free when you buy a skein of Lorna’s Laces Lion and Lamb, or Shepherd Worsted. I used the Lion and Lamb, and the colour is Irving Park. The yarn is lovely and beautifully soft, unfortunately none of my pictures show the colour up particularly well. For once it is not actually raining today so I might try and get a shot in day light. This pattern is of the variety where you cast on an unfeasibly large number of stitches and then do a couple of k2tog rows among your garter stitch to get the curly shape. I had a little go at the type where you cast on a smaller number and then do strategic increasing, but I knit so tightly that it was actually painful to do all that increasing. I think the decreasing strategy works better for me, and I don’t end up with painful shoulders and neck! Knitting is supposed to be relaxing after all!

Anyway, got to dash now, my parents are staying for the week and we are meeting my sister for lunch in a minute. Tomorrow me and Mummy are going to the knitting show at Sandown Park, so I will hopefully blog about that later!

In the spirit of the New Year and all that I thought I would tidy up my side bar, so here is a list of the things I knitted in 2005 with links to the appropriate blog entries.