Pretty Petals

Last week, I showed you a little teaser of the back of a cotton t-shirt I'm knitting.  On Friday night, I finished that piece and cast on for the front.

I wanted to knit the back first, to figure out exactly what I was doing, since the original design calls for both the front and back to be knitted in five separate pieces and seamed together.  While I don't mind a nice evening of mattress stitch, that seemed like a crazy amount of extra work when they could easily be knit in one piece for back and one for front.  However, doing so also means doing a lot of configuring and a lot of what knitters dread most: shaping that happens "at the same time..."

I had to put the shaping for all of the pieces together in one monster piece, and I thought it would be easier to do that on the plain stockingette of the back.  Having figured all that out, it's easy now to concentrate on enjoying the pretty flower pattern on the front of the t-shirt, bobbles and all.

Blast from the Past

I have a big stash of knitting yarns, it's true.  Enough for several sweaters and shawls and innumerable socks.  Most of the time, I've bought the yarn with a specific project in mind.  Of course, when I bought it, I was chomping at the bit to get started on that particular project.  All too often, I get distracted by one thing or another, and it is shelved while I get excited about something else.  In some cases, the yarn has been sitting in there for ages, just waiting for me to be inspired to pick it up again.

This particular project has been in my Ravelry queue for four years.  It's a summer project - a little cotton t-shirt - so every summer I intend to make it, and then the summer sneaks on by and I put it back down the queue for next summer.  Well, a couple of days ago, having finished the afghan, the shawl, the hats, I realized how few projects I had on the needles right now.  And I can't start my next Camp Loopy project until August 1st, so...  I felt inspired to cast this one on, and didn't hesitate.

Perhaps it looks a bit odd right now for a t-shirt, but all will be revealed soon enough.  (I hope.)