Errata

One of these days, I need to learn to read first, knit or whatever, next. These two blocked squares have become a ring pillow for a friend's daughter's wedding, but it wasn't easy.

The directions were written for the back of the pillow, and no problem there. It worked up quite nicely.

Then I started to work on the front, using the chart for the heart design.

Uh, just a thought, but shouldn't the charted directions and the written directions have the same number of rows in them? I think so. I had to re-do the chart (below) by changing the numbers, and by adding eight more rows to the charted design.

The chart called for six rows of seed stitch above and below the center stockinette field. The written directions called for ten. It does sort of make sense to have fewer rows since knit stitches are taller than they are wide, but I had already made the back, so I followed the written directions and used ten rows top and bottom.

Then yesterday, Thursday morning (the shower is tomorrow - Saturday), I turned over the right hand page for the first time, and discovered that the two squares are crocheted together. Oooops. No crocheter I, although I did once take a class on crocheted edging at my LYS; I think it was a couple of years ago. Since I don't really remember how long ago it was, guess how much I remember of the actual class material. (not much)

I took the book to last night's knit-night, and one of the women who works there reviewed the instructions with me, and this morning I put it all together (only taking out the crocheted edging twice), added the ribbon, and it's ready to go to the shower tomorrow.

The pillow is made from a pattern in Luxury Yarn One-Skein Wonders, and from 2/5 Gemstone Silk from Halcyon Yarns. It's real silk, produced by some specific silkworms in Japan, turned into yarn in Switzerland, and dyed in Bath, Maine. I am very happy with the finished product, but next time I have a date that something is due, I won't wait so long to get it started. And I'll check for errors in the pattern first.

See, old dogs can learn new tricks.....

[Note: I just looked on Ravelry to see what other knitters have made from this lovely yarn. Only one other knitter has made the ring pillow. Another knitter made a thong. I don't know what to say.]

I Was Going for Cute

but frankly, this elephant hat creeps me out a bit.

Maybe because it was staring at me all last evening as I worked on the third granddaughter's hat.

I hope my grandson won't be frightened of it!

Mistakes Were Made, Again

My older daughter, the writer/copy-editor, calls that sentence an example of the use of the past exonerative verb tense. (There is no such tense, but I like the idea of it.) No one MADE the mistakes; mistakes were MADE (not by me, not by you, not by anyone apparently. They just happened! Really!)

So that's what I'm claiming about the hole you see in this scarf I'm making. It is the Ripple Scarf from Luxury Yarn One-Skein Wonders: 101 Small Indulgences. I had said that I would never make this scarf again. I had said that I would never work with black yarn again because of this sweater, which I long ago attempted to make in black mohair. And yet, here I am, again, making the scarf from h*ll with not one, but two, black yarns knit together, the perfect storm of misery.

I had been zipping right along, making no mistakes, and feeling that I had conquered the pattern that was so deceptively easy that making mistakes had just been too easy the first time I attempted the scarf. And suddenly, I looked at the whole of what I had knitted, and there it was...

the huge hole.....

How had it gotten there? Obviously, I had dropped a stitch, but then how did I have the correct number of stitches to work the pattern from that point on? I had counted each row...twenty stitches...and just kept on knitting. It's a mystery.

I was going to shove the whole thing in its project bag and take to to the LYS on Wednesday, when Jan, our Yoda, is there to solve problems for us. But then I thought that if I am, as I sometimes claim, a process knitter more than I am a product knitter, why should I object to taking the rows out? Certainly that's what Jan would tell me to do (or offer to do for me, not that I'm intimidated by ripping out lace or anything). And if I don't mind knitting, stitch by stitch, why should I mind un-knitting, stitch by stitch?

So I did, and it took about forty minutes to go back the five or six rows I had knit after the dropped stitch. I had been warned by another knitter when I picked out the sequined yarn that I had better be careful with the knitting because frogging it back was difficult with the sequins getting caught in stitches. How much fun was ripping this back? Exactly none. My knitting friend was right.

But in another twenty minutes or so, I re-knit the rows I had frogged, and now the scarf looks just fine. But I am being really, really careful from now on.

And I still don't know how I continued to knit, having the correct number of stitches for the lace pattern, when I had a dropped stitch unravelling.

And I'm sticking with the past exonerative tense. It just happened, all by itself. Really!