No longer top secret...

So I've had this top secret project that I've been working on, and haven't blogged about. I wanted to try to submit it to Knitty - I started it before Christmas of last year, and though I've worked on it quite a lot, it wasn't ready until now. I had to re-do the top part of it four times to get it to where I was happy with it.

1st attempt: Body way too short.
2nd attempt: I don't even know, but somehow my calculations were way off for the sleeves/neck opening, and the whole thing was very wonky... Not good....
3rd attempt: I hadn't cast on enough stitches for the sleeve openings, and it almost worked, but not quite.
4th attempt: Finally!

I really like this type of pattern: Cast on for the body and knit in 2x2 rib with a lace panel in the center, framed by 4 purl stitches. Knit until the body is long enough (really!) and then bind off for the underarms - on the next row, cast on enough stitches to go over the arms, and then mark the corners where the raglan style decreases go... Decrease on each side of the markers every other row, and bind off the lot. I literally had two ends to weave in at the end, and I was done!

The yarn is some of my own handspun... It started off life as a couple of lovely merino/tencel rovings that I picked up at Lambtown last year. One a pretty rose color, the other a nice peach. I decided to throw in a bit of orange to the mix, and dyed up some more merino tencel. Plied all three together into a 10oz skein, and realised that I had made a terrible terrible mistake. The orange was truly eye searing, and with the other two subtle colors there was an awful lot of clashing going on. So I threw the whole skein into a dye bath with red, and came up with a very respectable skein of yarn (10 ozs worth even!). I blogged about the whole adventure last year here and here:


So we had our little photo shoot out in the bright and the wind... It's hot here today! Then we went for a little walk along the railroad tracks. I was asking the BBE if you could get to Larkspur Landing by just walking that way. No - but we could go take a look... So we started walking and ended up going over these old, old traintracks that are way high up in the air. They were actually used to film part of one of the Dirty Harry movies - I guess he jumps off the train tracks onto a bus or something. But that's where I was. Me. With my not so tremendously wonderful sense of balance, and my fear of heights. Pretty clever eh? Though I think it's a very good thing for me to get out of my comfort level, and not let my fear of heights restrict what I can and can't do... I took this picture after we'd gotten about half way down the tracks... And of course, we had to get back somehow, and the only way was over these puppies!









On the way we saw a goose that I think was hatching on it's nest. I probably wouldn't even have noticed it (being all concerned with not falling through the tracks and breaking my neck!) if it hadn't started hissing.

We walked as far as we could go - there's a draw bridge, that is currently up - so couldn't go all the way to Larkspur, just like the BBE had said. But we were rewarded with a beautiful view of the channel going through Larkspur Landing, and out into the bay... If you look closely at the bottom of the picture, you can see our shadows on top of the railroad bridge.

Oh, and I've been surfing around a lot lately, looking for patterns, and ran across this beautiful corset called Rosebud's Request... Has anyone else made it? Is there a KAL going on for it? It's just gorgeous - and I want one - probably out of my handspun.