I haven’t gotten in the habit of posting here yet, and I had prioritized reformatting and installing plugins for the blog rather than actually posting more — but ended up mostly doing a lot more knitting than computer work.

Result: I’ve finished the body of the Bright Cardi of Brightness and have started the first sleeve, with 5 more days to go for the month.

This picture is out of date, but I’ve missed my chance at balcony sunbeam for today and it gives the best overview while you can imagine the unfinished edge:

After binding off the body, the next step was to remove the pink waste yarn and put the stitches on each side onto needles, then knit around, picking up a stitch in the gap at top and bottom.

Previously, I’d never been happy with my gap stitches on things like afterthought heel socks, and I was particularly worried about the stitch at the top of the shoulder because of it’s visibility among the stockingnette. So, this time, I tried the following:

Knit to gap, where there is a column of stitches running horizontally, with the side leg of one of those stitches “exposed” in the gap. Take the right needle tip in front of this topmost leg and insert it from top to bottom in the lower leg of the same stitch, lifting this lower leg and twisting it as you insert the left needle into the same stitch and knit into it, picking up the upper leg of the same gap stitch rather than working yarn. Put this stitch back onto the left needle and knit into it with the working yarn.

The result is neat and symmetric with two tiny holes with a full stitch between them, instead of the other options I’ve tried which give me a large hole crossed by a single leg of yarn, so I wanted to record the technique here to remind me how to do it next time!

Here’s the result after two rounds of knitting: one round to pick up the gap stitches, and one more round plain (and the return of the pink scrap yarn as a lifeline through the second round because I forgot to do it through the first).