I’m nearly done with grey yarn, the fifth ball would have done the second sleeve and part of the collar except that I started the collar with a fresh ball. I found a sleeve that I was happy with, it’s the one on the right. Looking at it now it looks just about identical to the one on the left so I can’t say that my full day of sleeve wrangling was well spent. It was less work than it might have been because I took off the sleeve just below the sleeve cap and grafted that back once I’d reknitted the top. The sleeve on the left has twice the number of short rows as the one on the right so there was less knitting in the second two sleeves than in the original.  I have the collar and neck bands to do but there is little chance of getting a modelled shot in daylight until next weekend.

I have been knitting a lot of sweater, some of it multiple times, but I do have something else to show. I still didn’t get around to making a proper icord hanger for the Christmas stocking, it’s always the last bit of finishing that I get stuck on. My current Christmas stocking is about the size of my hand and is full once it’s holding a satsuma. I’ve been meaning to knit myself a new one but so far I’ve knitted three and given them all away. It looks like I have been busy but if I told you that last week I’d knocked off a pair of legwarmers as well then you’d really not believe me. I did do some knitting on both of these, I knitted the black rib at the top of the legwarmers and the heel and toe on the stocking. Everything else was sewing and snipping of someone else’s knitting.

I said that the dog will settle onto knitting as soon as I’m not looking, I went to fetch the camera and came back to find naptime had started. The link between this and the current sweater is the clasps, I went to shop for them on line and then found that I could buy six with an attached cardigan for about the same price as three new ones. The seller said that this was hand knitted which I was not certain about until I’d unwrapped it but it really was hand knitted which made repurposing it so much easier. When you know how it was put together it is easier to take it apart. This was the ideal shape because there isn’t any, there’s no sleeve cap so the sleeves transformed easily into leg warmers with a bit of ribbing added to the top (knitted from the yarn reclaimed from the front bands).

You can tell this isn’t my knitting, there are no floats. Even the three stitch floats across the lice are all caught down. The top back is on the left, the fronts were knitted with the back and they are sitting at the top of the photo. I sewed down where the side seams would have been had there been any, sewed the upper backs together, cut the fronts off and sewed down the raw edges on the sewing machine. After that it was a simple matter of putting in an afterthought heel using the yarn from the front bands and scooping up the live stitches along the neck edge to knit a toe. Both the stocking and the legwarmers are upside down but because the patterns are reversible it’s not obvious. I could have done it with a cardigan with reindeer on but it would have meant more work taking the reindeer off and grafting them back the other way up.

I still have some fabric left from what was the fronts of the cardigan, I’m throwing them in with the washing to full them a bit because I see their future as slip cases and at the moment they are still a bit stretchy. i would do this again, ideally starting with a big roomy hand knitted cardigan with drop shoulders, no shaping and a reversible pattern. The clasps are an added bonus.