This might as well be the week of the Baby Surprise

These colours are driving me just a little bit batty. Its not as if I wasn't that way in the first place but honestly, had I known that I would be going through this, I have picked a nice crisp, easy on the eyes white to mix with the glorious Sherbet colourway from Socks That Rock. The brilliant fuchsia pink is a lot of colour to work with even though I absolutely love the way it looks. I can't wait for the sweater to be finished to see it in its entirety.

The Baby Surprise and I are getting along much better now. The evil 6 rows were replaced by 6 nicely behaved rows, and things went along smoothly till I needed to start the increases. Between knitting and chores, I am reading through the various Newsletters in the Opinionated Knitter, and caught the little ditty that EZ wanted us to do increases by casting on one stitch using the backward loop cast on.

She asks us to do this because it is almost invisible. She is right. It is almost invisible. And she is right. Can you see the increases here?

In the upper right hand corner of this second picture, you can see the tip of the green pin. Use that for a reference if you need too. The white pin is marking an increase. The increases have 5 stitches between them. See if you can locate some others. Tough, isn't it. These stitches are at the diaper line increases along the back of the sweater, where I don't really want to see an increase.

Not everything went smoothly using EZ's increase. I tried them on the corner increases, and lovely as they were, I could not see them easily. Pretty soon, I was having trouble knowing what row I was on. Should I be increasing, should it be plain, and where the heck did that corner stitch go? The markers had gone by the wayside but I figured I could do it without markers. It would be easy, right?

In the cold light of morning, before the cold light of morning in fact, I decided to rip back to the knit 3 rows straight, and do a more visible increase on the corners.

And yes, I have gone back to religiously marking my center of the corner stitch. The increase I'm using is a bar increase on either side of the corners centre stitch. Once the increase is made, I'm knitting the increase stitch. I don't know if this is how everyone else is doing this kind of increase, but when you knit that increase stitch, the pull on the bar almost disappears, and the increase becomes a good looking match for the previous decreases. I'm in my comfort zone with holes in the corners it seems.

I hope to get this little sweater complete today, but I do have some errands to run this afternoon. I'm going to stop by the Friday knitters for a quick cup of coffee too. Coffee, knitting and the company of good friends is a great way to spend an hour on a Friday afternoon.