Some of you may have been wondering (mmmm, probably not, but humor me) whether I was serious when I said I was going to cast on for the Quinn Cabled Bag asap. Well, I did. And I’ve made some progress. Not much progress, but apparently the sound of my fingers closing around an aluminum needle – while inaudible to adults – causes my children to cry and fuss in unbearable distress unless they are both in deep sleep or distributed about my person. So, in the past two weeks, this is what I have accomplished in the yarny arena:
I was able to sucessfully execute a provisional cast-on, using this tutorial from Knitty. Unfortunately, I could not seem to work neatly off of it. After a few attempts I snarled some unpleasant things at the whole mess, just did a normal cast-on and started knitting. I don’t care if I have a seam there.
It was while I was knitting this (lovely) band of cable that I realized that this is only my second project ever with Caron Simply Soft. I should really work with it more often – it is pleasantly smooth, a nice light worsted weight, extremely cheap and accessible, and of course quite soft. Unlike the LB Wool-ease I used to make the cabled shrug (which was poofy and fuzzy enough to conceal some irregularities in my stitches), the Simply Soft is a smooth, sleek, shiny strand that really shows the quality of the work. (Note that I am not claiming here that it is HIGH quality work. I didn’t make any mistakes, but you can really see when the stitches are irregular.)
The next step is to pick up 144 stitches around the long edge and work the bottom of the bag on circular needles. But, um, I don’t have any circular needles. Why does knitting require so many different and different sorts of needles? I was originally planning to work it flat (since I didn’t graft the ends of the top band together, anyway) but…that’s quite a few stitches to work on even 14″ straights. Fortunately (coincidentally, haha) I’m planning on placing a good solid Knitpicks order at the end of the month to hold me over during the house-buying belt-tightening period and I’ve decided to invest in a set of Options. Mmm, yummy. I’ve already got one set of dpns from them, and I absolutely love the feel of them. Nice and solid-feeling, very smooth (and shiny!) with a nice sharp tip. Very pleasant to work with. The circulars match, and with all the good things I’ve heard about the Options set, I’m fairly confident that it will be a good investment.
However, until then the Quinn bag needs to be put away. And you know what that means, right? New project!
To be honest, I’m amazed at the amount of craftiness you get done with such little ones!! Mine are about 22 months apart, too, but now they’re 3 and 5. It gets so much easier (and fun, too). Now if I could just learn to knit faster, I’d feel like I’m getting somewhere!!