Knitting it easy!

After the pain from my first 24 hours of over-knitting, I'm taking it easy. The pain followed a 'long' [according to WM and DD; I don't agree but my arm apparently does!] session of knitting with 3.75mm Knitpicks dpns and 8ply/DK acrylic yarn that I dyed myself. Nice mitten [my first ever] but an, oh-so-sore, arm!

Yesterday, I knit on size 6mm plastic needles with eyelash/novelty yarn [not my favourite choice of yarn but one of the few yarns I had to hand that could be knitted on large needles] - soft on the hands and easy on the arms; the needles are flexible, light in weight and easy to grip. Of course, it also helps that I only knitted every three hours for 10 minutes at a time [we used the kitchen timer to manage my progress]!

Today I upped it to 15 minutes for the novelty yarn and alternated it with casting on the second mitten on 2.75mm Knitpicks dpns. I've done a total of 900 stitches [45 rows over three sessions] of the novelty yarn scarf and 600 stitches [20 rounds over two sessions]. My arm is a little sore but not in pain like it was on Saturday. The smaller sized needles are definitely harder to work with - the metal is inflexible, the needles are actually heavier than the larger [in gauge and length] plastic needles and the short length [especially of the 2.75mm dpns] makes it hard to grip.

So, for my rehabilitation, I need to knit on large plastic needles; I will therefore probably knit a few beanies or maybe a Tomten jacket with two strands of 8ply/DK.

Thanks to all who have left comments or emailed me with suggestions for using my hand dyed 50g skeins of 8ply/DK acrylic. All suggestions will be thoughtfully considered, so keep them coming. I thought I'd just do a Noro/Vintage Hues look - knit until I run out of that yarn then change to another skein with similar colours - I've already grouped the skeins for that very purpose. And if I use two skeins together, I'll get more interesting effects, won't I?