Autumn Cape 2016 A long Term Project - Front Daytime Part 1

Autumn Cape 2016 A long Term Project - Front Daytime

Part 1

Finally I am going to start on the front pieces of the Cape. I still am using the term ‘Cape’ but in truth it has evolved more into a Cardigan than actually a Cape. However I shall continue using the Cape for ease.

The Front will be divided into two parts. One side will depict a ‘Daytime scene’ and the other side will be a ‘Night time’ scene. These two pieces will overlap each other thereby giving a choice between which scenes will be on top.

Before I can start knitting I need to make a design. I have decided that the daytime scene will have a ‘Fox’ on it. Therefore I needed to draw some rough Fox designs.

Rough Fox Design 1

As with the other animals I have drawn then it needs to be inputted onto chart paper.

Rough Fox Design on Chart Paper

That was the easy part. Unfortunately it has been so long since I had to cast on working downwards that I had forgotten how to put the stitches in the right order.

After several goes I was still getting it wrong and therefore did what I really should have done in the first place – make a test piece.

Test Front Daytime Piece

Now I had worked out the correct order of stitches I thought I could get on with some knitting. Needless to say it wasn’t that easy. One of the problems was I that I had to try and match up the top of the Front piece with the bottom of the Hood.

I tried this a few times but when I came to putting the knitting against the Hood it looked unwieldly. I came to the decision that I had too many stitches on.

Too Many Stitches

I had originally cast on 130 stitches on 5mm needles. This included the Selvedge. However I decided to reduce this to 120 stitches including the edges. My theory being that if I found it to be a little shorter it was easier to add another edging than it would be trying to somehow shorten it.

Matching the Hood Daytime 

The above photograph shows the process of matching at both ends. The middle part doesn’t matter so much as it will not be attached to the Hood.

The Front Daytime scene will be attached to the Right hand side of the Cape. This is on the Left hand side of the photograph.

In addition to matching the bottom of the Hood I also need to try and match the side pieces. The simplest way of doing this was to knit a few rows then pin it at the end.

Matching at Far End

The next blog will be building up the design