Azalea

I want to thank you all for leaving me nice notes and it was so good to receive your caring words. That's very soothing! ;) I had a new check up yesterday and it looks like that things have much improved, though I will still be under medications for another 3 months until my hormones stabilize again. It looks like I am not classified anymore in a such serious condition as I previously felt and was make to believe! What a relieve! It feels great to be able to celebrate life again! :D :D

I have been working hard on my next post about my trip to Europe. It's a long one with lots of photos but the new blogger is not helping much. While I was working on my draft post, some of my photos disappeared ( not being available) by itself. Strange? It's happening on this post as well. Does anyone has had the same experience?

Then, I decided that I should do a shorter post instead and talk about real knitting. Remember that I was working on a light purple sweater? I wanted to finish it in time to wear in Hokkaido. And I was able to do so but I wasn't so happy with the ending result. Here is an overview of the sweater in it's almost finished stage that I thought it woul be interesting to keep as a record.

The sleeves, front and back of the sweater were knitted separated and later sewn to the yoke. I am not satisfied with the reverse stockinette section that is knitted by picking up stitches from the side of the braided yoke and then knitted in the round. I should have started the decreases much sooner, so the area wouldn't look like a cylinder. But being a good student, I followed the teacher's instructions without giving much credit to my own senses. The teacher doesn't keep notes of her instructions , she relies on her memory and having so many students it's hard to keep track of every one's work. You can tell from the picture below that the yoke doesn't fit on my shoulders properly. I have to keep pulling the yoke down to have it in place! :D
Spring sure is coming, look at these beautiful Azalea bushes in my neighborhood. Thus inspiring me for the name of this sweater. The weather here can be very unstable. We had a Spring preview couple weeks ago and this week is so cold that I have to post with a small heater
next to me.

I only wore Azalea once while in Hokkaido. More precisely, for less than one hour while I was having a breakfast in the ski resort. One of my friends commented that the bottom part looked too "flipping". After that I felt a bit too conscious about the effect since the friend has a fashion designer background. Her suggestion was to knit the style with a thinner yarn instead. It's true, I found it not warm enough to wear without a over coat. And it wasn't comfortable to be worn as a layered clothing, perhaps it was too thick. So lesson learnt, will keep my future winter projects on thinner yarn from now on.

Actually, now that I am looking at the picture, it doesn't look so odd. Since this project gave me some trouble to process and the cost for it was close to be a small fortune ( I didn't pay the yarn at discontinued rate :( ) , I shall wear it while the weather still permits. The truth is that it's not a very comfortable sweater, due to the unfitted yoke.

Design: Pringle of Scotland

Pattern : Azalea , from my knitting teacher

Yarn : Chamonix from Jaeger (48% Angora, 47% Extra Fine Merino, and 5% Polyamide)

( This yarn has been discontinued)

Needles : Japanese 13 ( 6mm)

Modifications : There is a minor difference in the composition of the braids and the yoke braids are much smaller than in the original design.