Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Knitting

All last week I didn't get to work on the third pattern from the "Sampler M," so Sunday while the canner was cooling down, I finally worked on that one. Yesterday I printed out the fourth pattern and made time to work a couple of repeats of that.

I took a fair picture of the sampler so far, but it looks like blogger is still sputtering, and I haven't been able to upload it. I should put the Blogger status blog link in my sidebar!

I am using the gold US size 0 needles from one of my Susan Bates "sock needle" sets. I really like these needles, even just looking at them. Most of the points are nice and pointy without being sharp, which is good when I am trying to dig into three stitches to make a double decrease.

I knitted pattern 4 as written the first couple of rows, but then I changed the double decrease to the one Mary Thomas calls a "chain" decrease: you slip the first two stitches as if you were going to k2tog, knit the third stitch, then slip both of the first two over. This leaves the center stitch on top, and makes a straight line up the knitting, which matches the straight line between the two yarnovers.

Okay, it's just a little tweak, but the more I learn about what I'm doing in knitting, the more I seem to enjoy knowing how to change the patterns.