WIPeout 2009 - Comfort and Shield Vest

PATTERN: Pasticcio Circular Vest. Fantastic pattern - knit to size.

YARN: Patons Jet bought by the Old Flame in the K-mart $2 and $3 sales this last year.

PROGRESS: All done but the crochet around the armholes and the blocking. I started this in early March. It went to Narrandera and to visit Nanna, it went to Wagga a couple of weeks later for her funeral and kept me company in between. It really was both my comfort and my shield in that period.

ISSUES: I don't crochet.

ACTION: Ask a friend to do that for me. Spidey kindly obliged, despite liking crochet only marginally more than I do. I'm grateful in the extreme.

Steam blocked until it screamed for mercy.

All done and being worn. Apart from a tendency to slip on the shoulders, it's a divine garment to wear and I love it. Maybe, one day, when I can get a photographer, I'll get some action shots.

WIPeout 2009 - Vestigal

PATTERN: Vestish by Robin Dodge in size 2X

YARN: Recycled black 8ply crepe

PROGRESS:

• Back completed
• Front at 9" - nearly finished the waist shaping

ISSUES:

• It's for me, so I tended to put it aside in favour of other projects.
• I hate sewing up, I really should be knitting this in the round
• I got to 9" on the front - halfway to the armholes - and put the back and front together to make sure the waist shaping would be in the same place and discovered I'd knitted a 3x back and was knitting a 2x front. Effin' brilliant - very cross with myself.

ACTION: This will be unravelled, the wool washed and I'll knit another vest with it. I won't cast on until the end of this challenge though.

Clearing the decks

The twin nieces turned 13 this year. I don't know when I started these vests but they are a size 8 and were in a bag from Maggie Beer 's Pheasant Farm visited in November 2003 so I'm guessing 5 or 6 years ago.

2 pink vests for the girls

Found in a recent shake up of some boxes that hadn't been opened since I moved into this house 3 years ago, all that needed doing was finishing and sewing on the button band of one of them and the arm bands and buttons on both. So that's what I did yesterday.

The pattern is one I've knitted several times for little people and is in Panda Kids Knits Volume 3 which I still see on pattern racks around the place. The yarn - whatever acrylic K-Mart or Target was selling 7 years ago. The buttons from stash.

One of the reasons these weren't finished (apart from sitting in a storage unit for 12 months when I returned to Canberra) was that two little girls in Sydney had already had the same vest knitted for them from the same yarn that year.

Also found in the shake up was an almost finished jumper knitted for myself which I was never really happy with. It hit the frog pond. Joining it was My Oldest WIP. I went to sew it up and finish the bands yesterday and found that the back was a size bigger than the front. After all I'd been through with the bloody thing, it should think itself lucky that it hit the frog pond and not the bin.

The bin is where the second Jelly Belly vest ended up when I discovered I didn't have enough yarn to finish it and there was no hope of reclaiming the two balls already used.

So two items finished, two items frogged and one item trashed and I'm feeling much happier about what's on the needles. The rest of the WIPs are quivering in a basket and wondering who will get the treatment next. Hopefully there will be another couple of FOs this week and I can begin to think about some new charity projects with all the beautiful yarn that came in last week. It's weighing on my conscience a bit.

Oh, and if anyone sees my two cones of black 3 ply and generic sock pattern, please spank their bottoms and send the home - I need them.

Vested Interest

The Jelly Belly Vest pattern by Jenny McElhinney from Yarn issue 1, December 2005.

SIZE: One size 12-18 months

YARN: 2 x 50g balls Nastro Four Seasons cotton/acrylic blend donated by Spidey, leftovers from one of her lovely creations. It's a weird yarn. 2 chains of different colours, in this case a pinky apricot and a cream that sit flat like a tape. Knits up pretty, though, and has an interesting texture.

ALTERATIONS: Knitted in the round to the underarms, then flat so there were only the shoulder seams to sew. Also, I used the same finishing on the armholes as the neckline instead of the pattern's double rib, mostly because I was concerned about running out of yarn. As it turns out, the concerns were well founded and I have a scant 4m left.

This is item four for the Yarn Knitalong. I goes in the box for the women's refuge.