Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Moving Right Along

A bit more than half-done

I finished the first half of the chessboard yesterday: if I apply myself, I can crank out a lot of 3"-squares in one day (yesterday, it was 11), which means that another two good days of solid knitting, and I'll be done this part of the project. (I also finished the next diagonal of brown squares after I took this picture.)

This morning, I knitted a swatch of the tussah silk/camel down yarn as well (below). Those two giant pins are actually standard dressmakers ones, and there's an inch between the two of them. On the 1.25 mm needles, my gauge is 13 stitches and (roughly!) 21 rows to the inch.

Tiny knitting

Given I need pieces that will mostly cover the squares, I'm looking at something a bit over 100 stitches per piece -- depending on how the patterns fit, that's like 27 or 28 stitches a side.

Knitting the swatch took less than an hour -- I cast on 30 stitches and worked away until I had a bit over a half-inch, as I didn't want to spend my entire day knitting a "full-sized" swatch. I'll use knitting the pawn, which is what I'm going to start with, as a better gauge of the number of rows I'm going to need.

Am very pleased with how well the knitting is going, and how much yarn I actually have left to do the tabs that I'll thread the oak dowels through to form sort of a stretcher system to keep it open and flat.

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