Mystery Squares

I've been playing around with 9" squares for Helle. If this woman didn't have bad luck she'd have no luck at all. It's been a rough year for her and her family and a bunch of us from Laughing-Lace Knitting, decided to each knit up some squares. They would then be sent to Liselotte in Denmark where she would sew them together and deliver the finished blanket to Helle and company.

My two squares are a 'modified frostflower&leave design' and 'hugs for the Nie**** family' I'm going to try to drop in my graphs here but don't know if they will work. I decided on the ff&l design as it is an upcoming KAL that the bunch of us are in. Then for the hugs for Helle, just thought that would be appropriate considering the circumstances. Beside, just thought of it Helle signs off her emails with "Big Hugs'

Details:

Material: Galway from Plymouth in a dusty rose. It is 100% pure wool in worsted weight

Needles: Addi Turbos US 8's

Finished size on both: 9" square.

Observations while working on these little beauties:

This Galway is some nice wool. Rather soft, and washes up beautifully. Gona check around for more of this. Think this would be good for helmet liners. Need to compare price. Sorry, always looking for the better deal. And it appears the KP's yarns are cheaper. Oh, well still a very nice worsted weight wool.

Techniques:

Wanted to have the ( ) with the YO's to the outside all the way around the outside edge. Didn't work. Discovered that by using yo's on the lower edge of the ) only pushed the 'ridge to the inside wouldn't give me the / angle I was wanting. Man this is hard to put into words. So, the yo's have to be to the left of the decreases to provide a faux line to angling to the right. Drats, so much for symmetry. The top of the N on the left looks a little lacking not sure what I should have done to make that better. But end result looks just fine. Quit being so picky....geeesh!

The second thing I played around with was using the knit in back of stitch which provides a crossed stitch. It appears to work the best when yo's are done on an angle as opposed to a straight line. The first time I discovered this technique was doing the lacy pendant scarf. The pattern was written that way and I really liked the end result. To me it make the angled sections in lace more defined, neater. Not so sloppy looking. Set me to thinking what's up with that. So played around with that technique on this square. Planning on playing around with both techniques and posting a pict to this entry so as to document it visually.

I originally created this 10/16/05, but due to it being a surprise I didn't have it displayedin the blog. Now that Helle has her blanket I can post it. Hense the date difference.