casting on

wound a skein of madtosh into a cake during doctor who on saturday night, and worked a swatch yesterday!

i have a thing for argyle/diamond patterns, especially using texture rather than colour. i have about eight million diamond lace patterns. but as always, nothing is ust right, nothing can be left un-tweaked.

this swatch started with a stitch pattern i had printed off aeons ago. and i have to say... some of the instructions were completely inscrutable to me, so i just did something that seemed to get the same result. some i understood clearly what i was supposed to do, but i'm still not sure why... and some things i just wanted to change for my own design reasons. i switched the k2togs for ssks and vice versa, so as to make the decreases less "ridgy" and increased the overall number of sts per repeat, to give the pattern more "breathing room."

so here's my non-square swatch, starting with one pattern and ending up with another:

i'm quite pleased with the revised version.

and this yarn is absolutely gorgous to work with! i want more more more!