Abby's Totally 80s Legwarmers

My friend Abby is crazy for 80s music, so when this concert came along, she NEEDED to be there. Lo and behold, it happened to hit very near her birthday.

So I decided my birthday gift to her would be some rad legwarmers. We made a trip to Michael's so she could pick out her colors. She decided on a lovely glittery hot pink with a glittery lime green trim, both from Red Heart's Shimmer line. I used Lilliputian Stitches' pattern for Spiral Legwarmers, found on Ravelry.

To make sure my legwarmers were extra slouchy, I used size 10 dpns instead of the 8 that the pattern called for. And I did five repeats of the spiral pattern instead of four to make them a little longer.



A couple of things to note about doing the rib in a contrasting color:

1. To avoid a jog at the point of the color change, after one round of the new color, slip the first stitch of that color, rather than knitting it. Techknitting describes this technique very well.

2. To create a clean line between the knit section in hot pink and the ribbed section in lime, I should have knit the first row of lime, then begun the rib. This picture is from my phone and really blurry, but you can kind of see the difference between the two legwarmers--I realized my mistake after the first one and corrected it in the second one.



Oh, and finally, this was my first encounter with a pattern that called for a "stretchy bind off." As suggested, I used Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy Bind Off and was quite satisfied with the results.

Here we are all dolled up and ready to dance the night away to orchestral arrangements of such treasures as Come On Eileen and Welcome to the Jungle.