Red, red wine...it goes to my head!

It is Saturday evening and I am sitting here sipping, what I feel is, a well deserved glass of red wine - apt as, if you pop over to look at my Puss in Boots project, you will see that red has been the theme of my afternoon. Oddly - even my hands and nails are stained slightly red from this exercise.

No, not dying - ball winding!

Actually, red is likely to continue to my theme long into the evening (or until this red wine knocks me out) as Megan and I plan to do battle with the Castle Couture Wrap pattern template this evening. Or, at least, make a start.

I will take photos but how much of it I can show you now, I am not sure - it might spoil the surprise of the finished item? I feel that it would be sort of nice to reveal it in its totality, once Robynn has the written up pattern to publish? In the meantime, I will show you snippets as I work on it (if only to be mindful that I need to keep up progress on it).

Just be aware that I am a slow knitter and I am using 2ply cashmere, so....?!

In other knitting news (apologies, for the uber cheesy, auto-timer flash photo), it's been an up and down week for the Lace Shaped Tee.

Quite literally. I knitted up to the armholes and neck, then discovered that I had overknitted. The front did not match the back in length - so I spent my last knitting commute this week, unworking it to match the front, bah humbug!

I have also discovered a pretty obvious error in my work but y'know? I ain't working back that far to undo it - gawddamnit - it can stay as a feature.

I am determined to finish this. It will be the first ever knit that I will have completed for myself (the phyllo yoked languishes forlornly on my needles). You see, all my other knits have been presents for other people.

Actually, if this had been a present for someone else, I would rip it back to correct the mistake as I couldn't bear to give someone a flawed gift.

"Per-fect-ion-ist!" I hear you shout...

...I did post a techniques question on a ravelry forum this week regarding the shaped lace tee -I got the concept but was thrown by the instruction to lose a single stitch (yes, 1 lonely stitch) evenly across 32 stitches. Particularly when the section in question is right across the chest area (around the neck) and it is the transition from the striped lace pattern back into a vines pattern (as seen at the bottom). Logically, I would knit the 16th and 17th stitch together but surely that would show as it would be right in the centre of the top and would narrow the central lace stripe from 6 stitches to 5?

Yet quietly, knitting two stitches together at the edge of the lace section doesn't feel right either. Ho hum. Perhaps I just fuss over these things too much. Perhaps. Yet, while I am learning, it feels important to do things the right way, so that I know when and how to take liberties with patterns later.

Ahhh, well, I am off to poke Katherine with my Lantern Moons, so that there are photos of this afternoon's efforts tortuous ball winding efforts posted for you to see if you follow the links!

Have a wonderful Saturday evening, wherever you happen to be and whatever you happen to be doing. I'm now 0.5 of my way down that bottle of red wine. Megan is scowling at me. She may have to wait until tomorrow, so I can do the template tomorrow morning, clear headed(ish) with a fresh caffettiere of Whitards Coffee. Mmm, looking forwards to that already.