For Chrissy

This is just a quick post for Chrissy as I read her blog regularly. And I do mean REGULARLY. As in, I should be doing work right now, but I'm reading her blog. Today's post is about the Fall IK mini-poncho pattern. Anyway, since I happened to have some Andean Silk in Lettuce left over from another project, I had to get out the needles and try it out. Here's what I found.

I cast on 20 stitches on size 7 needles and worked a few rows. After being retarded and not bringing the yarn from the front to the back OVER the needle between the first slipped stitch and the next knit stitch at the beginning of the row and wondering why I was losing stitches every row, I ripped back, and got it right. Here's a few rows of the purse stitch:

And a close up of the stitch pattern:

I think that the gauge is supposed to be measured after stretching out the lace as I'm sure will eventually happen with blocking. But as it were, I'm not sure how to count my stitches here. Since the yarn over and purl stitches are so close to each other, I decided to measure the length between the first yarn over and the yarn over 10 stitches away. As you can see, my selvedge stitches really bunched up the knitting on the edges, so I decided to check my gauge away from the edges of the sample. But basically, it looks like the stitch pattern really expands if you give it a tug, and the stated gauge in the pattern looks about right +/- one needle size. The stitch pattern is beautiful though once you open it up, and I can see why Chrissy wants to make a whole poncho out of it!