Fruitcake

I knit a fruitcake. Fruitcakes have a reputation as the holiday gift everyone dreads. I think people like making fun of fruitcake more than they like fruitcake.

I knit a fruitcake that won't ever go bad. Fruitcakes have a reputation of being heavy blocks. This fruitcake is light and fluffy. I did consider trying to make an especially heavy fruitcake, perhaps by embedding a chunk of metal, but I couldn't figure out how I could do that and not have the heavy lunk destroy my washing machine during the felting process. As a result, this is a light & fluffy fruitcake.

I had a handicap in that I had never actually seen a Real Fruitcake. A friend gave me a sample as a model.		I used 10.5 needles.	Yes, I knit a before & after swatch.
				I used Lion Wool.
		For the 'fruit', I used Black Water Abbey yarn. Yes, this is a horrible use for very good yarn, but I had some odd ends around and this seemed like a good place to use them.
		Version 1.0 was 24 stitches in each wedge, increasing 3 stitches in each row. I think there are 21 wedges in the full round.
The edge (outside & center hole) is 10 stitches wide.
After stuffing and felting, the end result looked something like a giant donut. I was asked "have you ever seen a fruitcake?"	I decided to try again with version 2.0.		This time, the fruitcake is 'sport' size. I think it's 6 stitches per round, increasing 2 stitches in each row.
		Version 3.0 looks like an actual fruitcake. I left out the center hole. It was significant additional work and I don't think it added anything to the design. This took 3+ trips through the washing machine to turn into a fruitcake. The center is a chunk of foam cut to size. The tin is from Ikea. Each wedge is (I think) 12 st per side, increasing 3 st/wedge. I didn't write this down. The sides are 10 st per side.

2007.12