Sunday 29 November 2020

Deck the halls with FOs and holly

The pandemic has given me a lot of opportunities for poring over my Ravelry queue this year and I was inspired to get my hands on some Big Softie off ebay and get on with knitting myself a door wreath for the festive period. Then I made the mistake of posting about it on Twitter and got a request for one, but since it takes all of 4 hours to finish and I bought 10 balls of Big Softie, and since the request came from Yul and Me'Julie (if you happened to read this blog back in 2002 you might remember them) and they've had a horrible year of it, being pub landlords, I decided to oblige. 


Pattern: Hampstead Wreath (Rav link)
Yarn: Sirdar Big Softie, now sadly discontinued. 
Needle: 10mm
Mods: On the first one, on the left, I knitted 14 repeats of the cable instead of 13. The result was a bit too oversized for the pipe lagging - Wilko's only had 15mm lagging, so I stuffed one length into another to get the girth. So, on the second one, I cut to 13 repeats, as per the pattern, but narrowed the width by 2 stitches on each side, resulting in a slightly more stretched cover. I believe the third time will be the charm, when I will probably reduce by one stitch each side and knit 14 repeats, but who knows when I will get round to that? I think knitting two in the space of a week is probably enough. 

Now just to decorate, but how? I'm thinking a big glossy red ribbon bow and some fresh holly and mistletoe, and the toy robin that Krupskaya keeps trying to destroy.