Sunday, June 29, 2008

It slipped my mind

It's Afghan Sunday again and I've hardly touched the afghan in weeks, except to move the stack of finished squares around so the cat won't sleep on it. I did finish the Patt Tanton Hewitt square, which I was working on at the last meeting.

Hewitt square

I went down a needle size and this square still came out a smidge oversized (12-1/4”W x 12-1/2”H, after wet blocking). You can see it's a little taller than it is wide. It would have been even taller, except that I trimmed a few rows off. I ended the lower border with a RS inc row and then started the charts on Row 2 (instead of working a foundation row consisting of the last row of each chart, which would have meant two more rows). Correspondingly, I ended the patterned section with Row 2 of chart C, and incorporated the cables of Row 3 into the RS decrease row of the upper border.

Fidgety business: I found that the M1P’s distorted the reverse stockinette too much, so I replaced each with a backwards loop cast on in the previous row. And in Row 25 of Chart C, just to be consistent, I replaced the SSK and K2tog by P2togs by borrowing a purl stitch from each neighboring panel.

Here’s a hint I saw on Ravelry just after I finished: use two different-colored DPNs for the cable calisthenics. (By the way, Ravelry has a group devoted entirely to this project, and it's full of helpful and amusing people.) The tightness of the stitches while working those multi-strand cables made working this square physically tiring and hard on my wrists, but the high "ooh pretty" factor gives you a pretty high return on your investment.

I've almost finished the Salazar square, too. Here's a shot of the center section; I've got the borders done and sewn on now. Maybe I'll finally wrap up the chain stitching this afternoon.

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