Round and round

I've fallen into a bit of my routine with my pinwheel this week: I knit around and around on the train home after work, notice a few stops before mine that I missed a bunch of yarnovers, shove the whole thing in my bag and unpick the offending rows on my way in to work in the morning. No kidding, I did this everyday this week! Literally, two steps forward, one step back!

But I still love it! You may notice a weird thin pin-stripe in the picture: I decided to knit the 18 sleeve stitches on a piece of scrap yarn instead of fussing with a holder and provisional cast on. I have no idea how this will work out since I've never done this for a sleeve before, but this technique works great for making thumbholes in mittens and I thought it might do the trick here too.

Basically, you knit the sleeve stitches on a piece of scrap yarn then put them back on the right needle and knit them again with your working yarn and keep going as usual. When ready to pick up the stitches for the sleeves, all you have to do is unpick the scrap yarn to reveal 18 top and bottom stitches (I hope). Much better than a holder and provisional cast-on, don't'cha think? Provided it works of course ;0) I'm about halfway through the second to last colour change and will be ready to move on to the sleees in no time. Can't wait to take it off the needle and see what it looks like!

In other news, I picked up a really cool package from the post office last night: my hot off the presses (okay, maybe not presses, but you get the idea) needles from Knit Picks. I needed to get some US 1, 2 and 3 circs to round off my collection and thought I'd buy my beloved addi's but since we're in money saving mode right now, I need to curb the yarn spending for a while and so decided to give the Knit Pick needles a go because at $4.99 each I got 3 for basically the price of one addi!

The small needles (US 3 and under are not available as interchangeable needles so I bought their "classic" circs instead and while I haven't tried to knit with them yet I did take a close look at them and was really pleasantly surprise at how similar they are to my addi's. The wires are just as flexible, the joins are ery smooth and the tips are very light and tapered just right. I think I'm going to like them. I also ordered a few tips and cables to try out their interchangeable needle mechanism and will let you know it goes when I try them on the weekend.

Have a good one everybody!