Peanuts Progress

Thank you to everyone who came by and said nice things about Diva. She is very appreciative of the warm reception and agrees quite heartily with those who feel she needs to be taken out and about on a special outing. As soon as it gets a little cooler in Chicago, she will get her wish.

A couple of people asked about the button and the snaps and how I got the button not to drag the lace down. The answer is a simple one: I cheated. The snap was attached firmly to the fronts of the garment. When the snap was snapped, I found a place just above the snap to push the button shank through. I pushed the shank through both layers, then I used a button holder saftey pin to secure the button in place. I also worked hard to find a button that wasn't too heavy. This button is actually just on the edge of being too heavy. I don't think I'll ever be able to sew it down and have it behave properly. But that's okay, because it will need to come off if Diva ever gets a bath (the snap, on the other hand, is a clear plastic, totally washable, ironable, abusable clear nylon snap).

Salt Peanuts also saw some action this weekend. Friday night, I finished the left front and got the piece ready to be blocked. The front, like the back, is very curvy and shapely.

Salt Peanuts, Front Left

The fronts of this sweater are really an exercise in "how well can you follow instructions". I won't go so far as to say that the instructions are bad, but I feel like there should have been a better way to communicate all the things that are going on at the same time. I had three different ripping moments with this piece. The ripping in and of itself wasn't bad, and it didn't take that long to repeat what I'd ripped out, but it was a real pain to pick up the stitches. The Bergamo loops are much tighter than you might expect and don't grip each other as well as you might like. This means that you need a tiny need to grab them all up with and you still have to be careful.

Other than that, the knitting goes fairly quickly. I'm almost done with the right front. Stay tuned for tomorrow's episode.

P.S. The other thing I did over the weekend was experiment a bit wit Movable Type. I finally figured out how to get a real live archives page set up and I started to set up subcategories (a new feature of MT 3.1). You can get to my archive page by clicking on the word "Archive" in my tool bar above. Also, you'll see below the comment link for every post, information about which category the post is in. If you want to see more about the back story of a project, you can click the name of the category the project is in and pull up all the entries.