Category: Dumbass Knitting Mistakes

Alrighty, then

A Tale in Four Photos

Ouch. Yes, that was a painful decision. In case you can’t tell what that blob is, it’s the Vanilla Sweater, which I started LAST FALL. I got it almost to where it was in that first picture and decided that it was too snug, and that I needed to do some body increases. Which would have been fine, except I was almost ready to start the bottom hem. I put it in a bag and hid it, like you do, thinking it would fix itself.

Right. Fast-forward to earlier this month. I hauled it out, tried it on again, because, you know, it COULD have been fixed in the back of my closet.

Nope. I went ahead and did another several inches, adding some increases, because throwing more knitting at bad knitting will turn it into good knitting.

This morning I sucked it up, and with the help of a friend, took the whole thing back to just after I started knitting the body, and I’ll do it properly.

It takes two, indeed.

Three hours later

A Cautionary Tale

I started a new project a few days ago. It’s a lovely pattern, and lovely yarn, and the whole damned mess almost got tossed in the trash this morning.

The pattern is Quatrefoil, by Janina Kallio. It’s a dead simple lace shawl pattern, easily memorized after the first few repeats. The yarn is divine. It is Creamsilk, from DyeforYarn on Etsy.

I settled in this morning for some relaxing knitting, or so I thought. The yarn is 100% silk, and very slick. I wound it up using my swift and ball winder, which clearly was not the way to manage this.

It took me about three hours to get it untangled and wound up. Isn’t that a pretty nostepinne? It’s made out of holly, made and sold by Dancing Goats on Etsy. They have some lovely tools if you are in the market for a little post holiday gift for you or someone you love.

The right tools make all the difference, as usual. Back to knitting.

Nice recovery

I’m back in business with the cardigan.

Fortunately it’s a fun pattern, and lovely yarn, so I didn’t really mind having a do-over. Now it’s just mindless stockinette with some back shaping thrown in.

And I even remembered to change needle size like I was supposed to after the lace bit. I’m sure I’ll find something else to screw up along the way.

Someone remind me to cast on the correct size for the fronts when I get there.

Oh holy hell

Remember that new sweater I started? The one I showed you a swatch of a while back?

Here’s what it will look like when done, except not pink.

Pretty, eh?

So here is what the back looked like this morning.

And a closeup of that cable/lace pattern.

I finished that section yesterday. This morning before I headed off to work, I did the first row on the plain stockinette section, putting in the stitch markers as I went to mark where the waist shaping goes.

45 stitches, marker, 43 stitches, marker, 45 stitches. Wait, there are more stitches. I counted again. Then I realized that the “leftover” stitches were exactly ONE 14 stitch repeat worth of stitches.

Here are your choices:

A. I can’t count.

B. I cast on and knit that whole f’ing section using the wrong size numbers.

Yup.

I stuffed the whole thing in a bag and went to work. I prayed to the knitting gods that it would be fixed by the time I got home.

Here it is now.

If this wasn’t damned expensive Rowan Cotton Cashmere, I can tell you, I’d be tempted to build a bonfire with it. This better go as planned the next time.

Yarn Chicken!

I've been very slowly working away on my Douglas Fir hap shawl.

The pattern is knit end to end. You cast on a small number of stitches (30 in this case), then increase a few stitches each repeat for awhile, then knit the center part for awhile, then decrease a few stitches each 12 row repeat until it's back to 30 stitches, then bind off.
 
This is one of those patterns that you can use any amount of yarn, you just have to calculate how much you'll need to do the decrease part.
 
You can see where this might be going, right?
 
I weighed, calculated, weighed and calculated some more, and waded in. I'm now well into the decrease section, and playing the REALLY fun game of Yarn Chicken.
 
I have 16 repeats left. The repeat before last took 2.6 grams of yarn. The last one took 2.4 grams of yarn.
 
I have 18.5 grams left.
 
Now I know the repeats are taking less yarn each time around, but I'm not seeing any way here that I'm not screwed. If I'm not screwed, it's going to be very close.
 
Four options:
1. Buy more yarn. I've had this in the works for so long that there isn't a prayer of finding the same dye lot. There are a lot of variations in dye lots in this particular yarn.
2. Rip back to before I started the increases.
3. Decrease at a little faster pace.
4. Just throw caution to the wind and knit faster, because we know THAT always works out.
 
1 and 2 really aren't options. I'll never find an exact match, and there isn't enough whisky on earth to make me rip out that much. 4 is probably delusional, though I'm going to stick in a life line where I am right now and forge ahead for a few more repeats.
 
Stay tuned.

Oh Damn It

I’ve been trying to get some of these WIPs done before starting anything new. I worked on Evenstar yesterday and got a couple repeats done on the edging.

Today’s project is the Dog Mittens. This is my oldest WIP, started back in 2008. Good grief. I finished the first mitten not too long ago, and had knit about an inch on the cuff of the second. I spent most of the morning today knitting off and on, and finally stopped to take a photo.

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Pretty, eh? I’m all the way to the point of putting in the waste yarn bit where the thumb will go. I thought to myself (with some hubris-beware of the hubris, the knitting gods hate that) “I might even finish these this weekend!”

You can see where this is headed, right?

Then I had the bright idea to haul out the first mitten to compare.

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Click on that if you can’t tell what’s wrong. I had to dig back through my blog archives to figure this one out. On the first mitten, I held the white yarn in  my left hand and the dark blue yarn in my right. I apparently missed this point when I started the second mitten and switched them around. There is enough of a difference that it would bug me forever.

Damn damn damn. Out it came.

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And here we go again. White on the left, dark blue on the right. As it should be.

Is it too early in the day for whisky?

State Of The UFO’s

Here we go. I’ve been a slackard when it comes to blogging and knitting. I’m hereby posting photos of some of the things from the top of the heap in hopes of inspiring me to get knitting. There are a few more UFO’s in the pile, but I’m not dragging them out. These are the “in progress” projects.

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That’s the Platinum Seraphim shawl. I just finished the first chart, which is mostly stockinette stitch. On to the fun part!

Oh, by the way. I had purchased an ancient version of this pattern, way back when the designer, Miriam Felton, had a different blog and website. There is a rewritten version of this that you can download automatically if you had bought it from her new website or from Ravelry. I had run into trouble with the stitch counts on one of the rows, and sent her a message on Ravelry. Literally within minutes she responded with a “fix”, which was all I really needed, but she sent me a link to the pattern and had the new version in my Ravelry library waiting. I love good service!

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A River Runs Through It Socks, for John. That’s the first sock. John’s feet are about the same size as mine, but his foot is wider around the instep, so I’m doing a little widening around the gusset area so he can get them on his feet.

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Evenstar! Beads! I have to tell you, the beads are making me pull out every swear word I know. They are very pretty though, so I’ll suffer through them.

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Right. Another crappy Green Jeans Corduroy photo. That yarn is just impossible to photograph attractively. It’s Araucania Nature Wool, and the color is not quite solid, but not really variegated. In real life it doesn’t look so horrifically splotchy. And it’s hard to tell, but I’ve finished the bottom part and am knitting the back.

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If you have too many UFOs, the only sensible thing to do is start another, right? Right. That’s a Pretty Thing. I skipped right over all of February between our trip to Hawaii and when Riley got sick, but there was some Great Big Fun in there. Dorothy came to stay overnight to visit the fiber and yarn market at Madrona in February. We met Sally, the owner and inventor of the Knit Companion software. The three of us wandered by a booth with this incredibly soft yarn, then discovered that it was real MINK. We each swooned and picked out a skein, and a Pretty Thing KAL was planned. Here we are:

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We should look happy. All three of us got a lot of loot at that market. Sally is a genius by the way. I can’t imagine knitting without Knit Companion at this point. You should go check it out.

The Pretty Thing pattern calls for doing this on a 16 inch circular, which I’m not very fond of, so I found a video to teach me to knit on two circulars and took off. This will have to be frogged and restarted, unfortunately, since it looks like crap. My joins at each end are loose and wobbly, way too ugly for even me to tolerate. Part of it is my inexperience, but part of it is that this yarn has absolutely no memory, so it’s not very forgiving of knitting inconsistencies. I’ve dug out a 16 inch circ and will bite the bullet and use that on the do-over.

By the way, those needles are Chiaogoos, which are hands down my new favorite lace needles. The tips are perfect, the needles themselves have just a touch of texture so stuff doesn’t just slide off, and the cables are flexible but not too flexible. They also don’t have any memory, so don’t coil up on you while you are trying to knit. And the join is absolutely smooth. I dithered over whether to buy the interchangeable set or just a bunch of the fixed sizes, and decided on the latter since I mostly use the smaller sizes of needles anyway.

Things were in quite a whirl around here after Wintergrass. I realized that I had never picked my favorite artist of the festival. It just has to be Seldom Scene. We saw two of their shows, and they were just terrific as usual.

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My favorite song was their rendition of Darlin’ Corey. Here’s a relatively recent video of them performing this. Lou Reid’s voice alone is worth the ticket price to a show. If you ever get a chance to see them live, don’t think about it, just go.


 

Last but not least, Riley came home for good today. We decided to have her cremated, and the vet that did the home euthanasia brought her ashes back today. It was a bittersweet moment, but we’re glad we paid extra to do this.

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The Church of Bluegrass, Day Whatever This Is

Let’s sum up, shall we?

  • I fracked up both of the knitting projects I brought with me because I’m totally distracted. One is a mostly stockinette shawl, the other is a completely stocking stitch sock that I’ve knit a million times.
  • Laurie Lewis sang a “my dog died and I’m sad” song tonight, and totally destroyed both of us. John and I were weeping in our seats, then laughing hysterically at the fact that she was singing a dead dog song and we were sobbing.
  • I’m sure we’ll find this all amusing some day.

Tomorrow is the last day of Wintergrass. We haven’t enjoyed it as much this year, and that’s not surprising. I’m glad we came though, it provided a much needed bridge between this past week and next week, when real life obligations hit us like a semi truck. I might get around to posting about some of my favorite artists later on.

I’m off to fix the knitting screwups.

Crabby Crabby Crabby

That’s me. I just want to smack somebody, anybody, which generally isn’t considered good manners, especially when it’s not anybody in particular that I’m crabby about. John says he definitely doesn’t volunteer to be the smackee, though he was nice enough to say he’d make me a martini for cocktail hour tonight, so I guess he wouldn’t be on the smackee list anyway. The dogs are looking a bit nervous, though Willie’s not nervous, he knows that any respectable cat wouldn’t stand for being smacked.

Let’s see, what am I crabby about? Let’s start with being sick again. I’ve had some sort of bronchitis bug all week. I was at a medical meeting the last part of last week, started feeling crappy on Sunday, fortunately had Monday off. Went to work Tuesday feeling sick, had to take yesterday off since I couldn’t talk except to squeak. John nearly got smacked for laughing at my squeaking. I had today off, which was a good thing, but I have to work the weekend and tomorrow. Fortunately I’m feeling better, and I don’t sound like so much like a demented mouse anymore.

Then there were technology issues. I seem to have lost the camera cord and spare battery, fortunately I found a spare cord so I can upload photos from my camera. Then I lost my sunglasses, which may not seem like a big deal in the Pacific NW in October, but the sun does actually shine here at times. I found them today, in a case, in my bag, right where they should have been. Weird.

The big techno glitch is our cable TV. We have a Tivo DVR, which is only a month old. The old one gave up the ghost while we were in Scotland, we think it might have been a power surge when we lost electricity for a bit, but who knows. Of course it was just dead, so we couldn’t recover anything we’d recorded while we were gone, including the first couple episodes of all the fall shows I had lined up to watch. No big deal, we caught up with them online, mostly, and set up the new Tivo that they sent us. We’ve been a bit busy this past couple of weeks and haven’t watched much television, and sat down night before last to catch up a bit. Of course there are now about 16 hours of new shows that we’re behind on. We were in the middle of an episode of The Good Wife (great show, by the way), and poof, the TV goes off, and Tivo starts to reboot. After much swearing and messing around with it, it turns out the the NEW Tivo box has died as well, and all the episodes of everything we had recorded are toast toast toast. Crabby crabby crabby. The Tivo guy on the phone today has no idea how close he came to being smacked.

Last but not least is the knitting. Medical conferences are great for knitting! So I finished the Little Devil red socks I’ve been working on for about a hundred years. Here they are:

Done! Then I tried them on, they are too fracking short. It just wouldn’t be a Knitting Doctor post without screwed up knitting, now, would it? I stuffed them back into the bag until I got home and could deal with them. Who knows, maybe they would become longer with a little time out. Not so much. So in a fit of pique, I grabbed my scissors and cut off the very end of the kitchener graft on both of them. John was horrified. I got the first one ripped back to before the toe decreases and back on the needles. So they’re not done after all. More crabby.

The other crabby crabby crabby knitting thing is that flipping True Blood Faery sweater. This pattern is making me crazy for many reasons, which I won’t go into just now, but the sleeves are one of them. The initial pattern was just in a few smaller sizes, and the designer, who at the moment is on my smackee list, sort of jerry-rigged the larger set of sizes, but never actually finished writing it up. The sleeves were never finished in the larger size range, but the armscye measurement for the next size smaller is the same, so I figured I’d just use those instructions to knit the sleeves. After I got about a foot of sleeve done, I realized that this is just a mess. Several other people who have knitted this pattern have had to rewrite the sleeves, since the way she’s written it ends up with huge balloon sleeves at the underarm, not a look that is flattering to anybody, especially not me. Here’s a photo. The blue green sweater underneath is a Peace Fleece cardigan that I did a ways back. I mostly wear it as a jacket, and the sleeves are plenty big around under the arm to fit over anything I might need to wear under it.

It might not look so bad just now, but I still have  10 sets of increases to go, so that sleeve will be 20 more stitches around in circumference by the time I hit the underarm. Damn.  I’ll rip it back to just before the cables, and plan to dust off my sweater wizard software and come up with a different game plan. Crabby crabby crabby.

The not crabby part?

I have a pot of homemade bean soup on the stove! I have a sweet husband who loves me! I get to knit all those sleeve cables again! I love knitting cables! And I almost forgot to show you two of the things I bought in Scotland! Here they are:

Every Queen needs a pencil with a crown on it. And a God Save The Queen mug to drink her tea from.

Last but not least, I have a good job, and that means that I don’t have to knit for a living, which is a good thing, all things considered.

Ack!

We’ll get to the “ack!” later. The sister visit was great. Unfortunately all the good photos are on John’s computer, and I’m too lazy to go down and get them. We drank a lot, ate a lot, saw a few of the local sites, and for a change, had a bit of sunshine around here. Very little knitting got done, though I did get some spinning done. Here are a few photos.

I showed this before, but I finally got it washed and recorded the details. Again, this is Targhee wool, about 12 ounces of fiber, spun on the wheel. It turned out to be a heavy worsted weight, about 10 WPI, and around 1040 yards. This is going to make some nice warm mittens and hats. John gets the first set, and anything left will be mittens and perhaps a hat for me.

The next stuff is the fiber that I showed you in progress last time.

This is a BFL-silk blend from Wolf Creek Wools. I spun this on the wheel as well, and it is about 20 WPI, about a light sport weight by the time I got it plied. I had 4 oz of fiber to start with, it ended up being about 280 yards. I think this will be a lovely cowl, or perhaps some nice mitts or hand warmers. Or I might just keep it on my desk and pet it.

The next is the “ack!” part. I’m still working on that mystery electric baby blue thing. I’m at the point where I need to pick up a gazillion stitches around the edges. I sat down to do this while the sisters were here, and ripped out the picked up stitches about 4 times before I decided it needed a time out. The pattern as I’m adjusting it calls for picking up 128 stitches on each edge, I just couldn’t get this done without ending up with more or less than I was supposed to have. I suppose there could have been vodka involved, but still. This really isn’t a difficult task. I picked it up again today, and realized that instead of just wading in and picking up stitches willy-nilly, I should divide the edge in quarters with markers, it makes it easier to see when I’ve gotten off track. I got one side done at the salon today, and it should get done a little more easily from here. Here’s a teaser photo.

They just don’t make Cotton Ease in those great blinding colors any more.

I’m off to get a few chores done. We have tickets to a concert tonight at the Seattle Zoo, so I need to get it in gear. Later!

Closet Capers

I promised an update on the closet re-do. Here’s what it looked like in October, when the shelves pulled loose from the wall. We finally got it finished this past week, and we’re close to having stuff back in the closets. Here’s what it all looked like.

John doing the prep work.

The temporary closet.

Painting done!

My closet done!

John’s closet done!

And here’s what they look like mostly reloaded. We did a little more decluttering while we were emptying boxes back into the closet.

It’s amazing how much more usable space we have. I even have some empty shelf space. I was able to get some knitting related stuff off the floor of my office and in baskets on the shelves, which in turn makes my office much more usable. It’s a win!

On the knitting front, no photos, but I made a stupid mistake on the Big Pink thing last night while knitting in front of the television. I screwed up a plain knit row of all things, inserting part of a patterned row right at the beginning of what was supposed to be a plain row. Of course I didn’t discover it till I got all the way around to that section again. In trying to fix it, I screwed it up even more, and now I’m tinking back about 600 stitches to get to that section so I can fix it.  I think this is my own fault for saying something in the last post like “I only have about 6 rows left”. Please send whiskey, before I stab myself in the heart with a knitting needle out of desperation.

Progress, I Guess…

Because I’m knitting a Startling Pink Secret Project which I can’t show photos of on the blog, I decided to drag out one of the UFO’s from my short list of remaining UFO projects. Here’s the original list of all of them that I put together earlier this year:

1) True Blood Faery sweater

2) Crazy King Cole Mohair thing, um, stole RIP

3) Wollmeise Squashed Frog Socks Finished

4) Grey Ribbed Peace Fleece Socks with red accents RIP

5) Frootloops Morning Glory Stole

6) Puppy Mittens

7) Evenstar Shawl

8 ) Baktus Shawlette Finished

9) Euroflax Linen Facecloth Finished

10) Spirit In The Sky Beret Finished

11) Startling Pink Secret Project (new)

12) Brown Sanguine Gryphon socks (relatively new)

Six projects remain. I should renumber them so the UFO’s are on the top of the list.

1) True Blood Faery sweater

2) Frootloops Morning Glory Stole

3) Puppy Mittens

4) Evenstar Shawl

5) Startling Pink Secret Project (new)

6) Brown Sanguine Gryphon socks (relatively new)

7) Crazy King Cole Mohair thing, um, stole RIP

8 ) Wollmeise Squashed Frog Socks Finished

9) Grey Ribbed Peace Fleece Socks with red accents RIP

10 ) Baktus Shawlette Finished

11) Euroflax Linen Facecloth Finished

12) Spirit In The Sky Beret Finished

There, that makes me happier. Anyway, what was I saying?? Oh, yes, knitting. I dragged out the Puppy Mittens.

These were originally intended to be John’s, a nice little cozy pair of mittens to wear at the dog park. I stuffed the whole mess into a bag last spring when I got tired of them. Here they are again.

I finally had to face the reason that they got stuffed into a bag and hidden away in my office.

I have rather skinny hands. John’s hands are relatively small for a guy, but not this small. Damn damn damn.

Out they came. Here they are, restarted on larger needles.

I should be able to tell for sure in another inch or so if they’ll fit. If not, they’ll be mine, and I’ll make him different mittens. I better get busy. It’s just damned cold and icky outside, and supposed to get colder yet as the week goes on. I’d be embarrassed to have to wear store-bought mittens.

Swear Words…

Or,

It Was Bound To Happen

A basic rule of knitting is this: When you put something in writing on your blog such as “I have actually been very slowly making progress on that True Blood Faery albatross”, the knitting gods will bite you very hard in the butt.

I’m sure you all remember what I’m knitting. In case you don’t, it’s the Faery Ring sweater, by Mary Scott Huff. Here’s the best set of photos of the one she knit for her mom. Look closely at the front cabled section. Get the arrangement of those front cables in your heads so when you look at mine you will know why I invented several new ways to combine all the swear words I know into complete sentences.

When I started the cabled section, I spent several hours with knitters’ graph paper and pencil, plotting out the cable arrangement so it would be easier to knit. This past week I finally picked it up again after a couple of months sitting in time-out. I got to about row 10 of the cabled section and stopped. I had made a few minor errors when I was doing the charting part, and every time I would get to those bits, I’d convert it to the correct stitch in my head, but sooner or later I was bound to forget to do so. I figured I’d get out the paper and re-do the chart correctly, to make it more idiot-proof. Here’s a photo of the geeky nerdiness that is me. Click on it to see.

As I was finishing the second, revised, version of my chart, I realized the true error of my ways. This is not a little error. The whole damned jacket is knit in one piece up to the armholes, so each row is 308 stitches. 10 rows of that is 3080 stitches. After smacking my head on the table a few times, I got the sweater and looked hard at it in every direction, hoping that maybe, just maybe I hadn’t followed my own damned chart, but instead, somehow, had magically done it correctly.

Nope. Look again at Mary’s front center section, then mine. There are supposed to be a bunch of cables running beautifully on either side of that front center line. The 21 stitch section of seed stitch in my photo is supposed to be along the sides, under the armholes, not front and center. When I did my chart, I just made up my own arrangement of the cable sections. I have beautiful little cables under my armpits, and lovely seed stitch in front, where it doesn’t belong. I knew there was a reason I hate seed stitch.

Damn, damn, double f-ing damn. And then some. Out it came. There is one good thing. Having gone through this whole exercise, I realize that I really don’t need my honking 5-page chart. There are only 4 different cables, and they are all different stitch counts. There’s a 2-stitch cable, a 4 stitch cable, a 6 stitch cable, and a large 20 stitch cable. Once you get markers placed on the first row, you just do the cable that fits into the number of stitches you have in front of you. And then try to remember to do reverse stockinette stitch on the other stitches. I’m not promising anything at this point.