Tethera

Hadn't made a great deal of progress on this by the end of last weekend; and then managed to lose the battery-charger for the camera (which was exactly where I normally put it; I've been off work for 3 days with a stinking cold which left me completely unable to think for the first day and a half!).  So here's a photo of the blanket tonight:



One row of ewes to go before there's steeking...  eek.  Must check I have a 3mm crochet hook.

The first set of the second batch of ewes was... interesting.  Knitted them on Tuesday, with a temperature, and must have tinked as much as I knitted.  If a row of Fair Isle sheep turns out abstract, you know there's something going wrong...  Knitted along to iPlayer versions of Bake-Off for Comic Relief on Wednesday and Thursday and made more mistakes but corrected them.  There is something so compelling about watching people bake things on TV.  I'm really looking forward to Ed Byrne competing in the last one...  Anyway, back to the blanket.

I've been reading up on Ravelry, and a lot of people found the edging was quite wavy and loose before strenuous blocking.  Looking at the instructions, you need to pick up 1 st for every cast-on/cast-off stitch and nearly 1 st for every row, which seems a lot to me for a garter-stitch edging where I'd normally skip one stitch every few depending on the weight of the yarn.  I'm also aware that my tension/gauge was slightly out on casting on, so I'll already have used a little more of the yarn than intended, and the yarn's meant to make both the blanket and a hat.  So I think I'm going to stick to my usual thing with 4-ply yarn, picking up 4 of every 5, and that should save me a small amount of yarn; my garter-stitch tension will already be looser than my Fair Isle tension, so that might make up for it...