This past Wednesday night while relaxing on the couch and watching Little Women LA and Younger. I came up with an idea for a new pair of Boot Cuffs. When I finished my first pair of Boot Cuffs, I had planned on doing some more, but I got caught up in my spinning up more 3 ply white alpaca yarn and dyeing those skeins. Anyways, I started in writing up my pattern, which was originally planned for using size 2 dpns. However, are working my swatch in the round on my size 2 dpns, I found that my pattern not only needed a few more stitches, but I was going to have to change to a bigger size needle. So I put my knitting down for the night and headed off to bed.
Thursday morning came bright and early and after taking my dog Sue-chi out for her morning walk, I started in rewriting my pattern for size 5 dpns and 4 more stitches. I also decided to do a Long Tail Cast On versus my normal Knitted Cast On. Now for those of you that don't know I'm left handed and knit a backwards right handed, not the conventional left handed knitting. Anyways, I started in knitting a swatch once again in the round and found that my changing over to the size 5 dpns was working out so much better and my gauge was 10 stitches = 1 inch with the handspun 2 ply lace weight Sorrel Australian Bond Yarn I was using. I wanted to do a full cable pattern this time versus the 2 stitch twist cable pattern I used in my last pair of Boot Cuffs. That's why I needed to add 4 stitches as my original 60 stitches wasn't working out. I mean it worked out great for the 2/2 ribbing I had at the beginning, but for the cable there just wasn't enough stitches. So 64 stitches was working out just fine for my new pattern.
Once I had the right number of stitches and I truly liked how the Long Tail Cast On looked compared to the Knitted Cast On. I just need to know how long I wanted the bottom cuff to be, the cabled pattern and then the top cuff and how I was going to bind off the top. I decided 2 inches was enough for the bottom cuff and that the top cuff would be 1 inch, but the cabled pattern I just was going to have to decide that as I knitted. So once I got all of that planned out, I ripped out my swatch and started in casting on for the first Boot Cuff. I finished the bottom cuff and started in on the cabled pattern and after 2 twists, I decided that 2 more would be perfect, then with the top cuff it would be just right.
I finished the first pair of Boot Cuffs late Thursday night while watching Project Runway All-Stars and Child Genius. It took my 7 hours 30 minutes and 29 seconds to knit that pair.
I had enough yarn left over so yesterday, late in the afternoon, I started knitting on a second pair. I finished on Boot Cuff last night and started on the mate before heading off to bed. I'll be finishing up the mate today and adding it to my store too. If I knew how to turn my pattern into a PDF File I would do that, but I'm still learning about stuff like that and it may be a while before that happens.
