I'm pushing ahead pretty hard to get the knitting on this cardigan done by the end of July - I did the first sleeve in three weeks exactly, compared to 2 1/2 months for the back! (Which yes, has more stitches, but no cable.)
Then we'll reach the moment of truth - blocking, assembly, and finding out if my pre-work for gauge paid off and it fits...
The back and both front sides are done on my first ever cardigan! I didn't love how the cables were going on the first front side, but I'm really happy with them on the second. Now, "just" the sleeves, the collar, and assembly are left.
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I'm using the Nurture Cardigan pattern from the book Knitting the Neighborhood, which is official Mister Rogers needle knitting patterns, so I translated it for loom.
I'm not the first to this idea, but wanted to share my build. The railroad tracks made me want to do a roller coaster, and the 90° turns meant it should be a Wild Mouse style coaster, so I based it on the one at my local amusement park. When I showed my wife as I took pics, she suggested that I move the sign and add a "you must be this tall" arrow, so I did that at the end. :) I still need to expand and decorate the island, but I'm happy with the coaster itself. Might add more fence for a "line" or tweak one or two of the bars, but that's all.
Edit: the inspiration is here. https://youtu.be/Wu_H-6_5CzU?si=zjS3lNx7IGLSlfl_
Edit: I haven't posted a lot of galleries, and I see now that they're in the opposite order of what I meant. Oh, well, you're all smart, you can see what's up. :)
This weekend, I built a block house over the workbench near the bridge in Withered Wasteland. Nothing fancy, I probably won't even move anyone in. But I didn't like how blocky the inside ceiling looked, and I didn't want to just fill it in with cubes.
Long story short, I realized that I could paint the tent roof sides and corners brown and make a ceiling that looks really nice! I tried to include enough pics to show everything, but this uses both types of roof corner, rotated to fit the spots they're in.
I thought "I can't be the first to come up with this," and I did find this earlier post about a tent ceiling, but it only appears to use the flat sides, so I thought I still had something to contribute here. Hope it helps someone!
Reporting progress on a project that I've learned a lot from so far. I'm making the "Nurture" cardigan from the book "Knitting the Neighborhood," and tonight I finished a front side. I had already done the back. One more side, both sleeves, and a collar remain to be done. This is my first sweater, and my biggest project yet.
It's far from perfect, but it'll be ok. I'm not unhappy enough to do it over again. The curly edges are to be expected and will be fine when I attach the rest of the pieces. Up close, my cable crossovers through a fair amount of it are sloppy, but then I figured out what was going wrong*, and they're great after that. So the cables down the other front and the arms should be great. The sloppiness isn't visible from a normal distance, and I've been assured that will block out.
The one thing I'm really unhappy with is the loose cast on. I'm told it'll be fine when I'm wearing it, but I will probably look online for info on tightening it up anyway, because I'm not going to put a zipper on it, so I don't think it will look good. (I've seen a video about that before, just need to find it again.)
Still, like I said, I'm going to keep going. It'll be ok!
* Here's the trick to my nicer cables, which might be better in a video than written out. I essentially followed these instructions, except that I'm using a flexible loom and the regular knit stitch rather than an e-wrap.
On the row before the crossover, I do a loose double e-wrap on the center two stitches. Loose is important to get the extra tiny bit of space I need and is part of what I was doing wrong earlier, when I was doing fairly tight double wraps.
On the crossover row, I unwrap the extra wrap like in the video, then I also untwist the stitch, since I'm not doing e-wraps on the rest. I was doing that right the whole time, it's just worth calling out because it's different than the video.
After knitting the stitches of the crossover, using the video's instructions, you tighten up the working yarn from all six stitches. On my flexible loom, once I do that, the cable stitches want to pull the loom links into each other. What I was doing wrong was to force them all flat as I knit the next row. That was pulling yarn in from the surrounding stitches, resulting in loose stitches in the cable. You can see them if you zoom in on the picture. Once I figured that out, I switched to just making it somewhat flatter every row, and by the time I was closing in on the next crossover, it would be flat again. I hope that makes sense!
I'm working on a cardigan, which is knit in panels. When knitting circular items, I typically knit counterclockwise, with my hook in my left hand and the yarn on my right, but that's awkward on a panel because half the rows go one direction and half go the other. So on the clockwise rows, it can be hard with my usual method, because I still have the hook in my left and yarn in my right.
That made me wonder if other folks do like me and use the same hand for their hook both directions, or if I should learn to switch it up. I didn't want to try switching on this project, because I don't want to risk messing up my tension.
When you meet Gyrados, they're homeless, because even though their habitat is hiding right behind their waterfall, the torches aren't lit.
I've been groaning every time I think about setting up the equipment I'd need to get someone fiery to follow me over there, but I realized a super easy solution today when I was dropping something off in the Rocky Ridges museum!
There's a Fiery Magby statue and an on switch for it in the garden party area right next to the museum. All I need to do is pick them up, and I can start fires anywhere I want!! (And as far as I can tell, you DO need to take them both, I couldn't see a way to turn on the fire without the separate switch.)
So yeah, I picked them up, went to Gyrados, lit the torches in no time flat, and now he's got a home. Pyro mode: activated.