SHIFTY

Posting now, 6 months after completion as I'd forgotten to blog about it at the time.

I generally find myself avoiding massively popular patterns, not sure why (must be my inner teenager, resisting the popular). I couldn't avoid casting this one on though, it's a lovely design.
If you aren't familiar with the pattern, it's by Andrea Mowry and utilises the same 'blip' technique (sort of stranded knitting/slipped stitches) as her previously released cowl and shawl patterns. She's a good egg, if you sign up to her newsletter you generally get a discount on newly released patterns, which of course I took full advantage of here. There are endless colour combinations to be had, I wanted a fairly soft colour palette and needed to use up some Rowan Alpaca Classic I had bought for a cardigan I never knit. The Alpaca Classic is very lightweight, fuzzy and soft and is a sort of caramel colour, I held my counter colours doubled to make up the correct thickness (mostly used Scheepjes Our Tribe).

It was quite slow-going at points, not like whizzing round doing stocking stitch, definitely worth it though. I think I went up a needle size or two after seeing quite a few people's projects had turned out tiny, I like a loose fit (like Shaun Ryder). Another thing which was annoying me was the beginning/end of round 'jog' in the centre of the back. I used tips by Dayana Knits (on this blog post) and once I had weaved in the ends this helped a little too. After separating the arms/body I moved the beginning of the round to one of the underarms so it runs up the side instead.

It was a real pleasure to knit this one was. Sometimes it's nice to follow the crowd!