Elena Knits

I offered to test this for my friend Ivana who requested some knitters to help her with her beautiful design. I own a Kindle and one of the things I wanted to learn this year was colorwork, so this project was perfect for me. I had lots of Cascade 220 left from Émilien, and I was stranded in Tenerife with a bunch of ill people so it was the time to go for it.

I loved those quiet mornings. I used to get up one hour earlier than the rest and have that time for me and my knitting. The apartments were still silent and the sun was still rising. One could do lots of knitting, counting stitches and also design new things in the middle of that peace.

I read the pattern a couple of times and casted on. The first part was easy peasy and I didn’t have to give it a lot of thought apart from the mods. I have the Kindle 3 and the measurements are 19 cm x 12.5 cm so I had to cast on 44 st. The original measurements are for the Kindle 4th generation: 6.5″ x 4.5” (16.5 cm x 11.5 cm). You can check a comparison of both Kindles here.

Playing I Spy with my niece and calculating to modify a pattern is not a good combination. I started colorwork after 13 cm from the cast on edge  when it should have been 14 (the pattern called for 11.5) but it would have been too tight anyway I think. After this mess I luckily did one mod right to center the pattern by adding stitches at the beginning and end of the colorwork on both sides.

This was my first real colorwork. I got used to it pretty fast since I started knitting being a thrower and I soon became a picker, so holding two strands of yarn with both hands comes naturally to me (I confess I started the colorwork while I was in the back seat of a car going somewhere). It all seemed too beautiful to be true, and in fact it was. I discovered that I have a tension problem while knitting colorwork, and that part is not stretchy enough.

The first problem I saw was that I kept the yarn too tight when bending to the other side at the end of the round, but that was not the only problem. All my colorwork looked wrong when inserting the Kindle. After a bit of reading I tried new things. I tried then not to cram up the stitches on the right needle to have looser floats. It seemed to work better but I still had problems with floats from one side to the other. It worked more or less if I changed color at that point redistributing stitches but it was not very practical. After researching a bit, the best solution for colorwork with magic loop is having the work inside out (I think this is going to be one of the main discoveries for me this year).

I have to thank Tasha for her wonderful posts on colorwork. This couldn’t have been done without her help:

Vintage Knitting College
VKC: Getting started with stranded (fair isle) knitting
VKC: Tension, puckers & even stranded knitting

And also this post and comments:

http://cmeknit.blogspot.com.es/2006/02/armed-and-dangerou…

After finishing the sleeve it seems to fit my sister’s Kindle instead of mine. Hers is a 4th generation Kindle, like the one in the pattern, so I’ll give it to her.

PS: My sister and my mother are fighting over this Kindle cozy. I’ll have to make more!