November Stitching Update | Junction Sweater and Annie Bayliss – God Save the Queen

Happy Friday! I hope the week has been treating you well. We’re looking at a rainy Friday night and Saturday for the weekend and there’s snow in the forecast for next week. I’m hoping to settle in with an audiobook and a pile of stitching on those rainy and snowy evenings after the kids get into bed. I haven’t shared any of my projects with you in a while, so today’s post is dedicated to what I’ve been working on lately.

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I finally cast on for the Junction sweater (Ravelry link) this week! This is my first time to do a folded collar and it’s the coolest thing ever. First of all: the provisional cast on. A crochet provisional cast on was my go-to method for starting toe-up socks for a very long time. BUT! I would always crochet the chain and then knit into each individual bump to get the toe started and I wasn’t looking forward to picking up 128 stitches that way. With this tutorial, I learned that you can hold your crochet hook and your needle together and just crochet those stitches straight onto the needle. It’s incredible. It’s thrilling! And before I knew it, I had 3″ of the collar all knit up:

Second of all, I wasn’t looking forward to unzipping the provisional cast on and picking up each individual stitch on a separate needle and knitting all of those stitches together. And then this tutorial blew my mind a second time! I was amazed how easily the folded collar came together:

Knitwear designers are geniuses. I love it! And now I’m off to the races on the yoke of this sweater. I’ve already used the word ‘thrilling’ to describe this process, but it perfectly describes how I feel about this project.

I’ve also made some progress on Annie Bayliss – God Save the Queen. I was working on this while watching Magpie Murders a couple of Sundays ago and towards the end of the show (around 10pm) my eyes were starting to cross. When I sat down with this project again a few days later I realized that I’d added an extra stitch on the left border, so I ended up spending one of my stitching days unpicking that border and then another putting it back on. And that’s how it goes! One little mistake can take me two days of stitching to fix because of how small my stitching windows are. I thought about leaving it because I’m not a flaming perfectionist but it was very, very obvious and kept catching my eye. So out it went!

A lot of these darning stitches and divider rows are stitched over 1 thread of linen and are very difficult. Sometimes I feel like I’m just guessing where those holes are but so far it’s turning out well enough. I have my dedication to the Queen nearly all sketched up and I’m looking forward to getting to that part, but there are several alphabets to get through first!

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I’ve also been doing some quilting, but I’m saving those pictures for a post next week. And these two projects are interesting enough to keep me busy for quite a while anyway! I’m already looking forward to Sunday night’s episode of Magpie Murders and Matthew and I will be starting the new season of The Crown on Saturday night. I’m also having a little meet-up with a group of friends tomorrow afternoon! I hope your weekend is exactly what you need it to be. Until then – take good care.