here goes!

OK, I'm going to give this blogging thing a try!

I live a pretty dull life and, although I travel quite a bit and like to get out to restaurants, sports events and plays, I work from home most of the time and the highlight of my day often involves something one of the pets did. Like right now:

That's Hermie having a drink from my husband's water glass. This is one of those highlights I won't share with the family - I'll just silently chuckle next time he takes a sip of his water.

The point is I've wanted to start a blog for a while, but there are so many clever and witty ones out there, I felt like what I had to say wasn't very interesting. But I do knit a lot, I mean A LOT, so now that yarnharlot's got the knitting olympics going again for 2010 and the olympics is in Canada and I'm Canadian and I have a perfect project picked out. I'm going to try out this blogging thing. It will definitely mostly be about the knitting.

Here's what I'm knitting for the olympics:

It's from Alice Starmore's Pacific Coast Highway book. I bought the book and yarn at Ram Wools when we still lived in Winnipeg, so that's at least 10 years ago. I've got the original Scottish Campion yarn, in the right colors, except for the main color bracken, I'm substituting brass, and for the brass I'm substituting ginger. The net effect should be that for my vest, the light stripes at the top of the vest will be darker and the dark stripes lighter. I've already wound and labelled all my balls of yarn

photocopied my pattern so I can market it up, and even made a swatch of chart C

which is pretty close to the pattern stitch-wise, but a little less rows than the pattern row-wise. I knit an Alice Starmore cardigan once without paying too much attention to guage and sizing ahead of time and I wear it, but it's pretty big. This time I'd like it to fit a little better. The smallest size for this pattern is 43 inches so I'm going to reduce the front and back by 16 sts each (32 stitches in all, or about 4 inches). This should still be roomy, but not huge and has the added benefit that it makes each front 72 sts and the back 128 sts which are even multiples of the number of stitches in the charts (16 and 32).

So I'll park myself on the couch for the opening of the olympics tomorrow, cast on and cheer for the canadians as the fairisle magically grows in my hands.