Train tracks and jaywalking in Forbes Forest

Auugh! Blogger is not letting me upload photos this morning. I'll try to add them to post later. If you see them, I was successful.

Since it's Jack's turn for a grammy-knit sweater, I've started the Train Track Slipover (vest to those of us who live in the USA) from Louisa Harding's book Miss Bea's Rainy Day. I love the "Miss Bea" series of pattern books and I'm sorry that Katy has outgrown them, and now Jack is the largest size. It won't be long before I won't be able to use them for him either. I'll have to wait for son Stephen to marry and have children to use them again. I'm not holding my breath here, his current girlfriend is very nice, but I get the feeling that relationship isn't going anywhere. But I digress.
You can see a finished version of this vest on Siow Chin's blog. She knit one for her little nephew and it turned out beautifully. Jack has a large head, so I'll be sure to follow her lead and use the EZ sewn cast off at the neck. I have finished the back and here is a picture of it blocking.

The color is actually more of a dark teal blue-green. I'm a little unsure of what is going on with my gauge here. I was able to block it to the measurements in the schematic, but I had to stretch the width and sort of smoosh down the length. Yes, I did too knit a gauge swatch. But gauge swatchs lie, Stephanie says it's so! Swatchs with cables pull in, so you wash and block them and you have what you think is gauge. But maybe not. Huh.

Now, about those Jaywalker socks. I was knitting the toe of the first sock over the week end and realized I really didn't want to knit a second sock at all. Since I have two feet, there didn't seem to be much point in finishing number one either. So here's what it looks like now. I think this was just the wrong yarn for the Jaywalker pattern. Everyone else loves that pattern, you see finished Jaywalkers all over the knitblogsphere. So I am blaming the yarn. Some day I'll try the pattern with another yarn. Goodness knows I have enough sock yarn in the stash!

Remember when I received five balls of Knitpicks Merino Style in Cornflower Blue when I had ordered (or thought I'd ordered. Whatever.) five balls of Knitpicks Elegance in Cornflower Blue for the Midwest Moonlight scarf? I didn't send them back, they only cost about $12 and I didn't want to pay to ship them back to KnitPicks. I decided to use them for another pattern in Scarf Style. It's the Forbes Forest scarf by Kathy Zimmerman. A quick check of the required yardage for the pattern and the yardage on the Merino Style ball band suggested that I might not have enough yarn for all 20 pattern repeats in the scarf. So I deceided to knit one ball and see if I could get four full repeats. Well, it was just a few row short of four repeats. Here's a picture after I joined the second ball and finished the fourth repeat.

So I guess I'll knit until I run out of yarn and see how it looks. If its too short, I guess I'll order another skein from KnitPicks. Of course, it is bound to be a different dye lot, so that might be a problem.

Still no luck uploading photos. I'll keep trying today.