Breaking the jinx

Well, I've done two muslins for the shorts, and am finally as happy as I can be that they will be OK. The back yoke will need slight tweaking I think, but that's fairly minor, so I have cut out the real thing and started on them. I've not got very far though... I started constructing the pockets and after two hours and three rip outs, I had topstitching that didn't totally suck... Not topstitching I am totally happy with, but it will have to do. The fabric marks super easily, and not in a good way. Which means multiple rip outs are a bit of a no-no. Even the blunt tracing wheel I wanted to use to mark the pieces was showing to the right side and the marks wouldn't go away when ironed. I've never had that happen before and it made marking the pieces rather a challenge. I used a blunt soft pencil in the end to just very lightly mark the fly and other essential marks on the wrong side. I am sure that is very much the wrong thing to do though. Having had a bad topstitching day, I decided not to do the fly until tomorrow.. sewing that tonight would be asking for shorts that open the wrong way, or unzip from bottom to top.

Talking of trouble, I usually find that the construction of shorts brings rain, cold and extended bad weather. In order to break this jinx, I have begun knitting not one, but two pairs of socks. Hopefully, this will totally confound the weather, which won't know whether to jinx the socks by being nice and warm, or jinx the shorts by raining and will therefore give up and go back to its usual activities. The socks are going fairly quickly. One pair is just plain but knitted in self stripe yarn. The other socks are called Catherine, designed by Kate Blackburn. I got the pattern from Ravelry. They have a wonderful pattern of diamonds on the legs and feet and this is my first time making a patterned sock. I'm enjoying it, but do find myself counting stitches out loud a lot and its not yet got to the point where I can relax and knit whilst watching television. That's what the plain pair are for I guess.



And last night, I had the horrible task of unpicking three months worth of knitting. I made what should have been a beautiful short sleeved sweater with a pretty ribbed yoke that formed a sunray effect. It was a vintage pattern and I was really looking forward to finishing it and wearing it. Sadly, it didn't fit anywhere on me and the yoke looked dreadful because instead of falling just to the inner edge of my shoulders, it lay an inch outside, on the top of the arm, adding to the idea that I was five years old and had just tried on my mother's sweater for a joke. Not pretty and I was rather upset. But onward and upward as they say. My sweater is now a pile of badly wound balls of yarn in the bottom of the stash box and will no doubt become something else in due course. Possibly a cardigan.