More Four o'Clocks and Then Knitting

It's interesting to me the way these four o'clocks change color as the season wears on.

Here are these guys happily blooming in white with pink flecks all summer long, then suddenly it gets cold and a couple of blossoms come out completely pink!

Another thing I like about my four o'clocks is that they will bloom well into fall. It was all of about 40 degrees F. (around 5 C.) when I took this picture.

My knitting-book birthday present to myself was a copy of Sheila McGregor's Traditional Scandinavian Knitting.

Yes, I finally got started on the strikke-along, and have already torn out this mitten cuff. It was too big, and I decided I didn't like the pattern.

I was trying to explain to someone how I used the invisible cast-on, the one where you pull out waste yarn to leave live stitches, for double knitting. Here it is in photos, after I knitted about four rows of each color. There are 8 needles in it, 4 in the dark green and 4 in the white. (When I start the second mitten I'll try to remember to take photos of the cast-on.)

The third photo from the left shows the side, so you can see green and white at once. The fourth photo is how I pick it all up and start double knitting. At the bottom of that photo you can see three needles: one with all white stitches, one with all green stitches, and a third one with alternating white and green. The needle on the left side of the square has already been picked up, alternating white and green.

And here is how it looks after a couple more rows. If I was doing the strict Strikke-Along, I should really be stranding instead of double knitting. But I joined Strikke-Light, and couldn't resist making them reversible.

I've wanted to knit reversible mittens ever since I saw Carol Thilenius' pattern in Homespun, Handknit. Now I think (I hope) my knitting skills are to a point where I can do them justice.

The pattern is called "I'm making this up as I go along, picking patterns out of Traditional Scandinavian Knitting". The fact that I tend to knit by the seat of my pants also explains why I usually knit both socks or mittens at once: if I didn't, I would never have a matching anything, since my notes tend to be cryptic things like "cast on US 2, 36 st, knit on US 3, fleur de lis on cover".

PS to knit-listers: I am looking for a sock I can cut up and will do a blog post on short row heels soon!