Red Purl Afghan KAL: September

Another Red Purl meeting today. We had a nice group of us, about a dozen sitting and knitting plus various shoppers and others just stopping by. ("Wow, you're busy today"...)

Before I could even pick up this month's block pattern, one of my students from Thursday night is showing me her finished slipper to see if I thought it was right before she started the next slipper. It looked great.

I got the pattern and as I sat down, another student asked me about picking up stitches. We got her going and she knit for the afternoon making great progress.

Then a third student showed me how she was doing (also great) and knit for part of the afternoon as well. By the end of our time, she had decided she was going to run out of yarn (she's using doubled sock yarn instead of worsted) so we picked out a third colour and decided where to place it in the slipper. They're going to turn out cute.

So, back to the afghan: this month's pattern was designed by Wendy. She claimed to have picked the cables because she thought I didn't like them and wanted to trip me up. Poor Wendy...I love cables! (hee hee hee)

The design is a honeycomb pattern (with an extra knit stitch between pattern repeats). It's thickly textured and lovely. Reminiscent of August's block, but with deeper texture and on a background of stocking stitch instead of reverse stocking stitch. I think the blocks will play off of each other nicely in the afghan as a whole.

One disadvantage of the cables is that they take up a lot of stitches (and yarn). For this square, for example, we had to add 18 stitches to the width just to make it measure the same as the other blocks. That's a lot of extra stitches on each row to knit. I wasn't even half way done the block by the time I left!

And, of course, just executing the cables takes a lot of extra time too. You only have to do them every fourth row, but there are a lot of them across that row. Excuses, excuses, I know. I have a meeting tomorrow night that I should be able to knit through so perhaps I'll have it done then. I'd hate to give Wendy the satisfaction of having her block take me the longest!

-Clickety Clack

PS I wore my Deep V Vest to the meet up today and it got unanimous approval. I loved wearing it too (even if it was 80 degrees out)!