The Joy of Swatching

Diogenes is edited. The poncho is ready to be mailed. The garden is under a few inches of snow. Laundry is done. It's a Saturday. It must be time for knitting swatches!

I've done a 'how in the world does this work?' swatch of Entrelac. It's an interesting technique. I may make a pair of socks in it someday, but unless I figure out a friendlier way to pick up stitches from left to right along a selvedge, I probably won't do much with it. I did, however, manage to do this entire swatch without purling anywhere except for the ribbing. Knitting back backwards, anyone? I'm not looking forward to writing down the step-by-step directions for how to do this, however.

One of my swatches has acquired the name of "UgliStitch." It's actually an elongated stitch, but I am not fond of doing those. I'd much rather do fine lace or Fair Isle than elongated stitch stuff. Abigail *would* love how the UgliSwatch looked, so I will no doubt be talking her through the process one of these days.

I'm going to upload some other photos of swatches into my Yahoo Pictures page. And then ... off to knit! Christmas is a comin', and I've got 5 1/2 pieces of footwear to finish before then. Let's see ... two will take a day each, two more will take about 3 days, so I've got 17 days to make 1 1/2 items ... it'll work.