Xanthe - Finished!

I finally finished up my Xanthe over the long weekend.  Blocking it was a little trying.  The lace wants to do one thing and the garter stitch another and trying to get them to compromise was a little bit of a challenge.  It came out very drapy, and it is generously sized.

I wore my Compassion Celadon to work on Tuesday and snapped a quick picture of it when I got home.

Patterns:  Xanthe and Celadon by Ambah O'Brien
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri Autumn Trio and Bright & Bold ombre
Needle:  US 5 (3.75 mm)

Xanthe - Lace Section 1 Done

I have mostly been focusing on my test knit, but it is knitting that requires a fair amount of focus, so when I'm a little tired, or actually want to be able to pay attention to something on the television, I've been picking this one up.  The lace on this one is pretty straight forward.  I am now ready to start the next section of stripes, which is a pretty long one.  Blocking will be interesting.  I'll want to stretch out the lace, but I don't really like stretching out garter.

Pattern:  Xanthe by Ambah O'Brien
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri
Needle:  US 5 (3.75 mm)

Xanthe - Stripes and Lace

I finished up the 47 garter ridges and have completed 13 rows of the lace section.  I did have to rip back a couple of the garter stripes when I discovered a loop hanging free at the beginning of a row a about half a dozen rows from the end.  I thought about just grabbing that loop with one of the ends of my first two colors, but that just wasn't going to look right so I ripped back.  I tend to work mostly with wool and wool blends so I can be pretty bold when it comes to ripping.  I pull the needle out and start pulling out the rows.  I move quickly until I get to the row before the row I want to restart on.  When I get to that penultimate row I pick up my needles again and put my needle through the stitch in the row below the current one and then pull the working yarn out of that stitch, picking up and frogging one stitch at a time.  I have successfully done this with lace as well, although yarn overs often get lost in the process.  In that case I work the next row very slowly and carefully, restoring the lost yarn overs as I go.

When I counted my stitches before starting the lace, just to double check things, I discovered that I must have cast on an extra stitch - I checked all of my increases and decreases and couldn't find any extra increases or missing decreases.  Rather than get rid of that stitch I'm just working an extra knit stitch at the beginning of the row between the increase and the lace pattern.

Pattern:  Xanthe by Ambah O'Brien
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri
Needle:  US 5 (3.75 mm)

Xanthe - Cast On

I cast on my Xanthe this weekend.  Ambah is running another KAL this month "It's a Wrap" and I couldn't resist.  I'm using an Autumn Trio from The Unique Sheep.

The colors are (from bottom to top) Crumble, Strudel and Granny Smith.

The pattern is simple, but there are a lot of stripes, which is a repeat of 4 rows.  For the first section I have to repeat those 4 rows 23 times.  I really wanted to use Smart Counters, but you can't use Smart Counters with Text Overlay, only with Charts.  I started out with the just the text overlay and using one of the counters to keep track of my 4 row repeats, but it still bugged me that I couldn't automate that.  So I came up with a hack.  I went back to Setup to crop the 4 rows as a chart instead of text, but before I did the cropping I rotated the page until it was upside down.  I then cropped the 4 rows as a chart.  I put in 4 for the number of rows and just made up a number (20) for the number of stitches.  I then went into Smart Counters and set the repeat to 23.  I went back to the main project view and selected the chart.  But wait - my text is upside down!  I had to do that because charts advance from bottom to top, while text advances from top to bottom.  I locked my iPad orientation and flipped it so the text was right side up.  Everything else is now upside down, but it doesn't matter, and I don't have to worry about forgetting to advance the counter manually at the end of each 4-row repeat.  Did I mention I don't like counting rows of garter stitch?

Pattern:  Xanthe by Ambah O'Brien
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri
Needle:  US 5 (3.75 mm)