Room for improvement!

First rounded corner

I've used the knitted on sideways border once before, but it was with my Pinwheel baby blanket, which was knitted in the round. There I had a narrower border with only 10 stitches wide, and over 500 life stitches to work with.

Anonymous asked how this works, so I'll try to explain, for those who don't know yet:

With this blanket, there are no life stitches. That's why I have to pick up stitches as I go along, with a separate strand of yarn and a double point needle, I pick up between 20 and 25 stitches. With a different strand of another ball of yarn (same color though), at first I cast on (in this case) 16 stitches. This is a garter stitch border, so I knit the sts and when I come to the last stitch I [K2 tog] the last stitch on my right needle with the first stitch on my left needle, which is the needle I picked up the stitches with. Turn. Knit 16 stitches, turn, knit 15 sts, K2tog and so on.

Of course, eventually you'll come to a corner, which needs to be rounded, in the truest sense of the phrase. You do that by including short rows. As you can see, I made some progress with my corners. My first corner had not enough short rows and is turning up it's nose at me. There's one rule, the wider the border, the more short rows it needs, but with corner # two and three I used the same amount of short rows, they still don't look the same. Why's that? It also depends on where you place the short rows.

So you see, I'm still trying to figure out the best way, still have one corner left to improve, but to be honest, the third corner already looks good to me. ;o)

Second rounded corner

Third rounded corner

Last night, my arm hurt to much to keep on knitting, so I decided I would go through my knitting books and make two piles. The smaller pile is the one, where I've knit at least one project from, the way bigger pile are the books, I've knit nothing out off yet, but that's about to change. I've noticed that there are 4 sock knitting books, which I like, but still didn't use so far. I had way too much fun designing my own patterns. Anyway, that's what I'd like to do in the future, knit from my knitting books. That should be interesting ...

Have a nice weekend!

And yes, that's still my pumpkin from last fall. Still going strong! ;o)