Last month I started my first Fair Isle project, a raglan pullover with a Celtic knot design from Sweaters from Camp. I experimented with both the one-handed and the two-handed techniques, and finally settled on one-handed (Continental). I'm a Continental knitter -- I suspect that holding the yarn in my left hand comes naturally to me thanks to my many years of crocheting -- so I just couldn't get used to the "throw" method with my right hand. Still, even now that I have the technique down, it's going very slowly; I'm just about done with the second repeat of the Celtic knot pattern. I think that the main reasons it's going so much slower than I normally knit are 1) the pattern is different on every round, so unlike with repetitive patterns, I can't just memorize the repeats and therefore I need to constantly refer to the chart; and 2) I'm paranoid about the tension of the floats in back -- I keep having to pull on them to make sure they're not too tight so the knitting won't pucker. So it's slow going. I should have started with an easier pattern, but I picked the first raglan I saw that I liked -- I didn't want to tackle steeks yet.
In another round I am planning to put the sleeve stitches on holders and continue just the body, so I'm hoping that will mean I can get more than 2-3 rounds done in a day, since they'll be smaller.
As a travel project I'm making a pair of anklet socks (Girl's Best Friend from Knit Picks). I'm using some yarn left over from this top -- I wanted socks to match it. Of course, the pattern is different, but I don't think it matters much. I finished one sock -- took a couple weeks because the only time I work on it is on the way to work every day (when Ray's driving -- he drives in the morning so I can knit while it's light, and I drive home). There were a couple serious mistakes in the pattern that confused me until I Googled and found Knitty's errata page. The pattern is a downloadable one -- you'd think that if it has mistakes it would have been easy to fix it directly. Or at least they could have alerted me to the errata page when they sent the download link...very annoying. One of the errors was in the turning of the heel and I must have ripped it out and redone it 4 or 5 times before I turned to Google in frustration!
In non-knitting news, I'm taking a sewing class the next two Saturdays. I bought a sewing machine months ago and it's hardly been used because, frankly, I kind of suck at it. So hopefully this class will help some.
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