Rainbow jumper and scarf

As is usual when I ooh and aah over colours in a knitting magazine, it transpires that they are false.  I don't know how many times I've been caught out by this.  I see colours which are lovely;  I order the wool online;  the wool turns up and it's entirely wrong.

There is a lovely rainbow jumper in Simply Knitting 181, knitted with blocks.  I decided to knit it for my daughter, omitting the blocks which I didn't think were necessary.  I thought the rainbow stripes were in soft shades:  red, orange and yellow in spring shades, with a clear turquoise and soft lavender.  

Hah!  It's not turquoise at all but emerald green and the lavender is dark purple.  How can they get the colours so WRONG in a magazine?  One could accuse the lighting of altering the shades but the colours on the wool website were exactly the same:  much lighter than they actually are in real life.  

I just honestly could not be bothered to send the wool back, although I should have done as it isn't very nice to knit with.  It's fuzzy and the stitches split and tear.  I'm seriously going to be hating it by the time I'm done.  The yarn, in case you want to avoid it, is King Cole's Riot DK and the shade that is so hopelessly wrong is called Chameleon.

This is what it looks like as a (short) scarf:  

 

I've also started knitting the jersey but fear I may only finish it next winter as I'm mighty bored.  I've also noticed, to my despair, that the ribbed edge is curling and nothing I do will flatten it.  I foresee a very annoying jersey that my daughter may not want to wear (the wool is quite scratchy and she's a delicate flower, like me!)

On the Simply Knitting Facebook page is an image of the jersey as it appears in their magazine.  You can see straight away that the colours are different.  There is NO yellow in the image above (taken in harsh February daylight) and the green and turquoise are miles apart.  Yet this is the shade called Chameleon, exactly as I bought it.

Why not buy your wool from a shop where you can see the colours, you might ask.

To which I would answer:  I live in central London.  WHAT shop??

My first pair of socks!!

I finished my first pair of socks!  I'm hugely pleased with myself, even if they ARE full of mistakes!  

My first socks!

Once I'd finished, I read through a pattern of "normal" socks for DPNs and could actually make sense of it! The pattern for straight needles isn't that much different, then. I DO like the seam, which is very inventive and attractive and also VERY easy to do - also very quick. I was so impressed with it, I might use it as a feature the next time I knit a raglan-sleeved jersey. I was also surprised at how easy it was to "turn a heel" and knit a "gusset" (though to be honest, sitting here without the pattern, I can't actually remember what the gusset is!) The errors I made had nothing to do with the pattern.  I struggled to pick up stitches along the heel flap (oh, right, THAT's the gusset!).  As you can see in the picture below, I ended up with a horrible hole that I'm going to have to go back and mend somehow.  I also never had the right number of stitches on my needles - I really I can't work out why! Did I forget to decrease?  Usually I'm quite careful with these things! But it's all a matter of practice, small things I'm confident I'll get right over time.

As for the errors in the book, Knit Your Socks On Straight, there are still a few issues. It transpired there was no error for the heel flap, but the instructions aren't very clear, specially for the first basic sock, when the knitter is panicking slightly and needs to be lead carefully through the rapids. I can forgive a printing error but not one of the author's making - the star toe is NOT right. This point has been raised by other reviewers as well.  I might go back and give my review another star, though;  after all, it did give me confidence to actually knit a sock (or two)!  

For this pattern, I used Sirdar Escape DK which appears to be mostly discontinued, much to my disappointment as I really liked the colours and it's lovely to knit with. I've recently finished a jersey for my daughter (just as winter vanishes for another six months....) and have plenty more:  I bought a huge stash to play with!