Elizabeth Zimmerman is melting my brain

I am attempting to knit her February baby cardigan from her Knitter's Almanac for the very sweet baby of a friend. It is a beautiful cardigan but the instructions are contained within a pithy page, not written in a particularly logical order, or certainly not logical to my brain. Hopefully now I seem to have got to the end of the yoke increases relatively unscathed things will improve, meanwhile I spend time staring at the page, clutching my hair, the cogs of my brain turning perceptibly.

This is not to denegrate Elizabeth Zimmerman in anyway, she was a far better knitter than I will ever be, but her patterns are not written as clearly as is common today. Today one can be relatively safe taking things line by line and following the instructions, providing of course that one has read through the pattern first to check for nasty surprises. No one wants to get through inches of a garment suddenly to discover previously unsuspected steeking* for example.

The Peasy cardigan is chugging along, I'm working on the body, which always was going to be a fairly long job, although its plain stockingette nature does make it excellent conversational knitting.

Another thing I had been meaning to mention on here is the overall content and aim of this blog, it does, even to me, seem somewhat muddled. I initially aimed to start a knitting blog, with perhaps the occasional gentle foray into baking, sewing, drawing or other creative and/or domestic arts. However, as you probably know, I am a Christian, or follower of Jesus Christ and contrary to common perception He is interested in us and in our lives, what we get up to. So what happened was that He turned up, walked in and sat down in the middle of my intended knitting blog. Jesus is interested in all of us, not just the 'religious' bits, the Sunday bits, but in literally everything, from our love lives to our messy sock drawers and He is interested in what interests us. Hence why my blog has become a mix of Jesus, knitting, yarn, cake and a lot else besides.

I'm not apologising for any of this because even if it looks utterly potty to the outside world, I am a follower of Jesus and this blog is an expression of who I am, or some parts of it. Likewise although for parts of last year this blog became somewhere I came to pour my heart out after Amy died I am not 'tidying' that away. I did consider it, but decided upon reflection to keep this blog as it was, with all its mess and human untidiness.

I would like to improve the appearance of my blog, if anyone knows anything about this do get in touch, my IT knowledge sometimes simply runs out. I should also try to blog more often, we'll see how we go with that one.

P.S. I have started adding the yarn I knit to www.knitmeter.com and in January I knitted more than 1500m of yarn, scary thought...

* For the initiated, steeking requires the knitter to cut their knitting to create an opening, such as for sleeves, or the two fronts of a cardigan and is often used in colourwork knitting.