It's Friday food but I must confess, I am not much of a cook. I can cook, and I do cook, but I get no pleasure from it and therefore only cook out of necessity. Food to me is a necessary evil. It's not that I don't enjoy food, I do. I like it very much, I just don't like to be the one to prepare it. So I will leave the Friday food posts to those who have better talents like Miss T, Amy and Connie.

Instead I thought today that I would go with an Eye Candy Friday.Ceptin' I'm not big on candy either, but I does like me some cake. Cake, everybody likes cake!
Jamieson's Shetland double knitting, triple layer cake.


I rarely knit for myself, when I choose a project to knit I usually have it in mind for someone else, actually I choose a project on it's level of interest to me, what becomes of it once it's complete is usually secondary or further down the list. (Remember - Process knitter here.)

As a result I usually do not have anything to show others of my efforts, for I give my knitting away. This doesn't upset me, because the giving is voluntary, I have received what I wanted out of it by making it and I enjoy sharing handmade gifts. However it does get a little embarrassing sometimes when I'm always knitting and have nothing, except for a pair of socks or two of my own to show for it. (This was one of the main reasons that I started this blog to begin with, so I could show my friends and family that I do too knit stuff, even if I don't have that stuff around to show them.)

So with that in mind sometime ago, maybe two years, I thought after knitting two different Alice Starmore Fair Isle patterns that perhaps I would choose and knit a sweater jacket for myself to wear. Buying this much Shetland wool for the sweater is a fairly large chunk of my yarn money allotment, so I only knit one sweater like such per year or perhaps bi-annually.

This was the Starmore sweater design that I thought I would like to knit for myself. I'm not sure about the hat though, where am I going to find one like that? Still I like the sweater.

It's called Rona and it is in an Alice Starmore book, "In the Hebrides" and these are all the colors for it.

And this is how far I knit on it before it got shelved for other projects.( Another Jamieson's Shetland sweater but not for me.)



I haven't worked on this project, because something was amiss, I had a sinking feeling that it was going to be too big, so I recently brought it out of cold storage and measured it against a sweater that I'm comfortable wearing and yup, it's too big. (Apparently my self image is larger than it actually is.) So I'm planning to restart this sweater.

I can't bear to rip this much knitting out right now so I'm going to leave it, and rip it afterward if I need to. I'm even thinking that I might not want to knit this sweater after all because looking at it, I'm thinking it's kind of boxy, maybe I should think about updating it a bit, or not. I did want to wear it more as a jacket rather than a sweater. Hmm, I'll have to think on it a bit.

It does remind me a bit of a carpet pattern, What do you think? Will this look like a jacket made out of carpet?