Ravellenic Games Challenge

Ravelry is running the most amazing event to coincide with the Olympic games in London, the Ravellenic Games.  You cast on during the opening ceremony for a project which will challenge you.  This allows beginners to take part as well as the really seasoned knitters.  The item must be completed by midnight on the day of the closing ceremony.  Everyone casts on during the opening ceremony so you have knitters from across the world all casting on a new project at the same moment.  Ravelry provides a nifty little timezone calculator so you can ensure you are casting on at just the right time.  I must admit as I cast on I thought of all the other people casting on in other countries and wondered how they felt about the challenge they had set themselves and about being part of a huge community doing something together. 

I am a member of TeamPosh and am knitting a cardigan, in fabulous Posh yarn of course.  The yarn is called Journeys' End and is Posh Yarn Megan, which is Blue Faced Leicester.  Its such a fabulous wool, springy and soft and luscious and as always with Posh, the colour is fabulous.  I got it as my first installment of the Posh Yarn  Club 2012, at least I got two of the three skeins.  Mum got the same yarn and donated one skein for my cardigan project, which was very kind of her.  Now I will admit, green really isn't my colour normally, and Army green has negative associations for me, however, this has a depth of colour and a subtle variagation with shades of gold and brown in the yarn which makes it very pretty and the colour seems to work with my skin tone a lot better than I expected it to.  I'm not sure the photo does it justice.  Hopefully the charm of the yarn will show itself once the cardigan starts to grow. 

The pattern is Same, Same but Different by Fallmasche, and is a contiguous version of her very popular Walnuss pattern.  It has saddle shoulders, pleats on the shoulders, sides and sleeve cuffs, and I am hoping its going to come out reasonably closely fitted.  I will probably add an extra set of waist decreases as this is where I usually need a bit of help with the fit of cardigans.  I would imagine I will have to lengthen the body as well, but the best thing about contiguous is it can be tried on as I go along, so it should hopefully be reasonably simple to monitor progress and adjust as required.

I am not certain that I can complete the cardigan in the timescale, but will have a darn good go.

This is the first eighteen rows, knitted whilst I was watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics.

I stayed up to watch almost all of the ceremony, surprising myself by how interesting and moving I found it.  I don't think I've ever watched one before. I tend to think the main advantages of sport are found in participating rather than sitting on the sofa watching it.  However, I am in awe of athletes (or anyone else for that matter) who are so dedicated and work so hard, giving up so much to be the best they can be, and the atmosphere must have been amazing in the arena.   To see the athletes so proudly walking around the arena, the culmination of so much hard work, self-denial and effort, was truly humbling.