Friday, July 11, 2008

Off the needles: silk shrug

I finished my silk shrug, I'm pleased with it - apologies for the fuzzy photo (especially to Madoka...but you can see it in person).


The pattern is from Erica Knights "Classic Knits" and it's knitted in 5 skeins of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk in the Celery colour.

The pattern, however, is really poorly written. Somewhat disappointing as I bought the book ‘Classic Knits’ for this pattern. If the other patterns are as badly written its unlikely im going to knit more. The pattern was not incorrect - but had a written structure that I had to rewrite to make it understandable: the increase pattern on the front was not complicated, but the pattern described the increase row, the subsequent rows were written like this:

Row 1 knit
Row 2 purl
Row 3 increase pattern
Rows 4-6 repeat rows 1-3
Rows 7-10 repeat rows 1 and 2 twice

Confusing - and unnecessary since the real instructions could have read something like "continue for 28 rows increasing on front edge every 4th row, and at side edge every 10th row"... I find patterns like this very frustrating as it's really just lazyness. The guernsey pattern was also like this - but it was an older pattern book - Classic Knits is a new book and I guess I expect better.

The shrug also used 5 skeins, yet according to the yardage estimates (for a different yarn of the same fibre and guage) indicated that 6 would not be enough.

Despite all this, I really like the cardigan; its drapey and lightweight and likely to be very wearable (although not with the dress I’m wearing in the photo!)

3 comments:

yarnivorous said...

Lovely! I bet it feels great on :-)

Anonymous said...

It looks great. You look great, (fuzzy?! what fuzzy?).
Was the Debbie Bliss silk easy to knit with? I heard an assistant in John Lewis telling someone it was not (splitting I think). However, I find that often the pleasure in handling a yarn overcomes problems like that - somehow you take the trouble to handle it more carefully. This was my experience with the RYC Bamboo.

alce said...

Very pretty! I love that yarn.