This is by far my favourite yarn in my entire collection. A warm salmony pink that is feminine yet not girly. It’s also gorgeous to handle and work with, warm, coarse and pliable. I am slowly developing a very strong love for Shetland wool. So it’s little wonder I wanted to make something for myself with this yarn. Greedy, yes I know! But how decadent…

I started with a front panel for a vest. Now by this point I must confess – I hate measuring, anything. I am generally over confident that my approximations will be quite exact. And this from a scientist?! It’s just that measuring things means I can’t start knitting ASAP. So I casted on what I thought would be fine for my waist measurement and went to work. I love this little border pattern from Alice Starmore’s gorgeous Fairisle knitting book.

But soon I began to realise I was being rather optimistic about my cast on. I had a few options now, and one of them was unravel the whole thing and start again. But then the other problem that I wasn’t convinced I had enough yarn to make a vest for myself made me rethink the unraveling. Now here I display another unscientific nature of my personality. I buy yarns before I have any project in mind. In fact it almost always is the other way around, the yarn inspiring the project.

So I made the rookie decision to convert this vest panel into a beanie side panel. I was happy with its length if it were to transform into a beanie. So I set out and made a second panel exactly the same. Thus knitting my first beanie without any pattern help from the pros or circular needles.

Then I did the stupid thing of joining the two panels in flat!…

…realised this won’t work, and started watching some tutorials at last after eating my ego. It was at this point I knew that there was only one right thing to do, order a set of double pointed needles. I unravelled all the flat joining the top of the two panels, left the side joins intact. I then unravelled the two cast off rows and picked each stitch carefully on the double pointed needles.

Did I make sure I had equal stitches on each needles? Yes, approximately!
This is what I have now…

Phew! So have I learnt my lesson on making sure I know my measurements before starting? Well all I can say is, I have realised that the bigger and more ambitious the projects get the less of an escape route I will have If I don’t get more organised.