Tweedy Pi

Pattern: Pi Blanket from Knitter's Almanac by Elizabeth Zimmerman

Needle size: 5mm

Yarn: Rowanspun DK

This shawl was lovely and simple, mostly just plain knitting. You start at the middle and knit, then you increase, knit some more, increase again, and each time the knitting takes longer before you reach the next set of increases. This made it an ideal project to knit at work. I followed the plain pattern throwing in a YO K2tog round when I hit the knit 96 rounds section to break things up a bit. As I had 5 balls of yarn for this project I decided that when I reached half way through my 4th ball I would prepare for casting off. I knit a YO K2tog round followed by 2 plain knit rounds 3 times. Then I did the knitted cast off that EZ recommends. The 3 rounds of YO K2tog's gave me a bit of interest at the edge as the cast off is plain garter stitch. I love this pattern and think that I will be knitting another Pi in the future, with some patterning this time. The yarn was good to work with and I think the tweedy flecks give a bit of interest to what otherwise would have been a bit of a plain knit. Unfortunately this yarn was gifted to me a few years ago and has now been discontinued.

I cast on for this on a set of 5mm bamboo DPN's. Once the first couple of increase rounds were out of the way I moved onto an Addi premium circular needle. I've seen these recommended on various blogs and decided to treat myself as I knew this project would be on the needles for a while. I have to say that they didn't disappoint. The joins between tip and cable were nice and smooth so I wasn't having to ease hundreds of stitches over snaggy joins. The tips were also comfortable to hold and sharp enough to make knitting easy (but not so sharp that I was accidentally splitting stitches all over the place).

All in all this was a good project and is currently in use keeping my knees warm in a draughty prompt corner.