Knit One, Cough One

It can't be the flu.  The only way it could be the flu if I'm having a mild dose after having the flu jab earlier in the year.  Yes, I am still achy, and the cough is spectacular, but it's only been a week and I'm already coming round. 

I have knitted and coughed and thought about a comment left by Sharon.  A lot of the bigger knitting yarn brands have a swathe of free patterns.  There are adorable patterns for babies, cute patterns for wash cloths and even some very pleasant sweater patterns for ladies.  Red Heart Yarns have some amazing patterns - like the dragon scale mitts here.  They look so tempting to knit!  How about this cute frog wash cloth?  It's bait.  You see the awesome patterns and then you buy their yarn -  but at least the pattern is free!  It must work for them - they have nearly four thousand free patterns and I'm tempted by so many of them.  Fortunately (I think) it's quite hard for me to get hold of Red Heart Yarn in the UK.  You can get a reasonable selection but you don't see it that often, you don't see it on sale and over here we don't seem to get a lot of coupons for yarn. 

You can switch it around.  I grew up watching my mother and grandmother look at the yarn requirements and immediately work out what to use as substitutes.  The better patterns usually involved the more expensive yarn.  If money is tight you have to trade down, but you have to work out how.  There are real experts on Ravelry, but personally I don't check the needle and tension requirements of the pattern.  Instead (thanks to the internet) I look at the weight, yardage and suggested needle size shown for the yarn required and find the equivalent.  Or, more likely, you can score a really good deal on something vaguely between a double knit and an aran (sport and worsted in the States?) and then rummage around to find a pattern that would work, sort of what I'm doing at the moment.

Image from WikiCommons, taken by Dave Wheeler and used under the Creative Commons Agreement

I used a pic of fair isle sweaters from WikiCommons because I couldn't find good pics of ganseys or guernsey sweaters or aran sweaters, the sweaters that the fishermen used to wear.  My family were always royal or merchant navy, not fishermen, so I don't have any direct experience but I just watched this amazing YouTube video.  It's a shortish documentary about the sweaters of Yorkshire fishermen.  Like most of the sweaters around the coast, the patterns would vary from family to family so that if the fisherman was lost overboard and then a body found then you could identify the body by the pattern on the sweater.  It shows one lady knitting a gansey or guernsey and she's knitting on five long, double-pointed needles as the sweater is in the round, has over 300 stitches and a complicated pattern - with fine yarn!  I don't think I'm up to that.