Nearly there!

I am proud to say that ‘I am nearly there!’. Friday evening I picked up the pieces… started on the picture, then put both sleeves, front and back on one big needle and began to knit the yoke (gazillion stitches per row!). And now the picture is finished (a lot of movies got watched…) and I am on the home straight. What a feeling. Isn’t this long, this jumper? But so is my nephew.Sewing all the ends in will take some time. Here you see how I sew them in with intarsia: It is important to loop the ends around one another, so there is no gap between the two colours. In this picture below you can see how yarn ends are looped when there is no other yarn end to twist them around – my finger points to a red loop that was carried up, so I make a knot around it. Most yarn ends really ‘tell’ you what to do with them, see the two below my finger, they ‘want to go’ towards the right in order to avoid wholes in the picture.

When I sew in the ends, I make sure I don’t just weave them into one row of stitches, I find that makes the ends more visible from the right side of the garment. I alternate between stitches from two rows (up and down and up and…), as you can see above.

On a different matter, for weeks now, I have been baking new cakes, cakes I have never baked before! Three weekends ago we had semolina peach cake, for Jo’s birthday a checkerboard cake, then a apple pie with a yeast base and this weekend (this is what is left of the lot, I made double recipe!): Lamingtons! I sure am no food photographer, but these were just beautiful!