The hood and one sleeve of the Tomten Jacket have been completed and I’m almost at the point where I have the “fun” of zip hunting.

Now, I’m not usually *that* anal about matching colours when using variegated yarns, but that’s usually because the yarn is for socks and no one really notices them when they’re very far away from your eyes. But having odd sleeves Bothered Me, so despite having plenty of yarn left to knit the other sleeve, I’ve ordered more yarn so I can match the colours.

So in the meantime I had to do something else and I decided to do the i-cord edging instead. I’d planned to knit the border in Jamieson’s Shetland Spindrift because it has a similar texture to the Kauni and comes in about a million colours. I spent a long time looking at the shade card and deciding which colour went best with all the colours of the jacket, before choosing one of the reds. And then when I found out that it would cost as much as the price of the yarn itself in postage to get one tiny 25g ball of yarn sent to me I thought “sod that” and went to my stash.

I have a couple of colours of Spindrift that I bought two years ago and have been helping bulk out my stash ever since. The Foxglove colourway is a sort of mottled purple and though I wasn’t convinced it would work, I decided to give it a go, figuring I could always rip it out if it looked terrible.

Well, it didn’t. It blends with the reds and blues, and contrasts with the oranges, yellows and greens really well. Possibly better than the red would have, so being tight-fisted clearly has its advantages at times.

The Applied I-Cord Edging is one of those things that I think are just impossible to get my head around until I actually do them and then it becomes blindingly obvious. A bit like figure of eight cast on, or Magic Loop! You begin by picking up stitches all around the jacket with the contrast yarn. And I mean all around – along the bottom edge, up the front over the hood and down again back to the bottom edge. It took ages. Then simply cast on three stitches with a new needle and transfer them to the pick up needle, k2, sl1, k1 (picked up stitch), psso and return the three stitches to the pick up needle and start over again. After the first few rows, suddenly a strip of i-cord appears attached along the edge of the jacket and it Looks Good.

Now all I have to do to bide my time until the extra ball of yarn appears is to sew up the sleeve seam..!

Oh, Donna asked how I was finding the yarn. It’s true it’s not as soft as something like Baby Cashmerino, but I don’t find it rough at all. It’ll be worn over clothes rather than next to the skin, too, so there shouldn’t be any problem at all. Plus any baby of mine is not allowed to be sensitive to wool.

Also just wanted to share another baby knit. Not knitted by me, though. Kai and Diane came to visit yesterday and we spent a lot of time knitting. Me with the jacket and manly sock, and them with mysterious and identical miniature projects. In the afternoon, I was presented with this tiny pair of baby socks. Tinier than the Hugs and Kisses Socks I knitted. Absolutely minute and newborn sized. They make good finger puppets for the moment, too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 9:20 am and is filed under random stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.