Wallaby progress

Yesterday (Friday) I finished the knitting on my Spiral Doily, hooray! Now I just need to block it. Pictures when it looks like more than a tangled pile of yarn. Hopefully tomorrow.

As soon as I finished the doily, I told myself it was all right if I cast on for Ryan's Wallaby. Part of the reason for that was because I managed to talk Tracy out of making this pattern (the one on the front cover) and instead, to join me in making a Wallaby. After much arm twisting she decided to cast on with me for a Wallaby, but using the stripe sequence and yarn from the sweater she was going to make before without sleeves, the curved hem, or fringe of the inspiration pattern.

She's making tremendous progress, especially considering that this will be (basically) her first non-scarf project. Both Rori and Tracy catch on extremely quickly. Well, either they act like they understand what I'm telling them and then go home and look it up and pretend that I taught them, or they're just smart women. I think it's the latter.

So I decided that for my Wallaby I wanted to put a train on the pocket. My boy LOVES trains (or anything with wheels, really) so I thought he'd get a kick out of it. I managed to design a motif from scratch which I'm quite proud of (and will probably post to share later). Pride goeth before a fall, as I used some bastardized combination of fair aisle and intarsia that created quite the smorgasbord of ends. Witness the horror:


But man, the front looks great!! It doesn't really lean like that in real life--I managed to smooth it crooked I guess. Really. I think it's darn cute.

As I was about halfway done with the train motif Ryan came up and looked at the chart and yelled "train, Mom!!" And I said "yep, I'm putting a train on your sweater! See?" and held it up. His face was totally blank. Then he said "no Mom, train here!" and pointed to the chart. He fell asleep before I finished it, so maybe he'll see a train on his sweater in the morning.

The knitting goal for tomorrow is to get the body of the sweater knitted up to the point when I can "fuse" the pocket and body together.

I am really proud of that silly train motif. It's recognizable as a train! Woo hoo!