Frogged

Except for the twisted broken rib ribbing which was a pain to knit and I don't want to do it twice.

Remember this sweater?

No?  That's OK. I barely do. I am making it from BT's Shelter yarn, which I love, but I had a horrible time swatching for it and after I saw another knitter's sweater, made from the same brand and weight yarn, I realized that my gauge, no matter what the swatch said, was too tight, and that the fabric I was creating was too dense. It almost seemed to be a felted fabric, which is not what the pattern designer and I were going for.

So it's frogged and now complete with lifelines. I'd like to report that I was being organized and had put the lifelines in as I knit, but I can't because I didn't. And it is such an easy thing to do with interchangeable needles that it's just plain crazy not to put them in.  

Next time. Remind me, OK?

I Am So Disillusioned...

I have always had complete faith in blocking. Blocking fixes EVERYTHING!!!

No. No it doesn't. My faith is shattered.

These are the sleeves for the State Fair cardigan I am making for my daughter. When I was knitting them, the total length measured around 16" more or less. Now that they are blocked, they measure 24". That is seven inches longer than they should be! 

Blocking stretched them to their actual length, I guess.  

I also guess I will be frogging the sleeve cap and seven inches of the sleeve. 

I just finished the right front and have started the left front. I thought that I was nearly finished, but my daughter is a human, not an orangutan.

#$%^&*()_!

Update:  Dumb, dumb, dumb. Put your glasses on, knittergran. The problem just didn't seem logical to me, so I checked again. I had read the measurement chart wrong and had not added the cap measurement to the sleeve-up-to-the-cap measurement. The sleeve is the correct length.  

Whew...

Frogging

No, not hunting these: Ripping out this:

This is miles and miles, well ok, hours and hours, REALLY, of ripping back knitting.

Knitting Lesson # 417 (or thereabouts):

Do not knit while talking with a friend on the phone about why you are NOT in Blowing Rock, NC as you had planned to be because the air conditioning in the car gave up the ghost in Greenville, SC and you turned around and drove back home in the hot, hot car even though the car had just had $103.00 worth of Freon put in it on Monday and was supposed to be just fine and had in fact worked fine for the first hour and a half of the trip and how you didn’t get to go to World Wide Knit in Public Day yesterday like all the other kids because you had to go car-shopping instead because dH wanted you to test drive the cars since you will be the primary driver of said new car and frankly, unless you are buying a turquoise Thunderbird convertible, car shopping is about as exciting as buying a water heater, and you do realize that you are NOT buying a turquoise Thunderbird, so really, all you do care about is that the car is comfortable and has functioning air conditioning and, wow, I am all about stream-of-consciousness today, eat your heart out, uh, what’s her name? - and I have discovered that ripping out purl stitches is easier than ripping out knit stitches and that I need to learn to read my knitting because if I had read my knitting instead of depending on the row counter which I had neglected to click a couple of times because I was on the phone I wouldn’t be spending HOURS ripping out stitches-oh, yeah, eat your heart out Virginia Woolf - and I hope all this ripping out does not cause me to put rocks in my pockets and walk into the nearest river because that would be the red, red Chattahoochee and …..yuck, and then I would miss a nice dinner at Bonefish with the friend I was talking with on the phone when I messed up my knitting and why are there quotation marks in this sign?

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!

Knitted Lace

Blogger Mary Ellen recently commented on one of my posts that after she tried making lace by tatting (something I would love to be able to do) she would be like a normal person and try knitting it. No one I know would call me a normal person, but I have been knitting lace. Mostly however, I have been frogging lace. Literally. I knit one row, end up with the wrong number of stitches, frog three or four or more rows trying to get back to the correct number of stitches, and even though I do not swear, I consider swearing.

I have spent more time frogging than knitting. Really and truly. I finally decided that I must learn something from this and I have. I will now pass on what I have learned:

1. When frogging knitted lace, use a smaller size needle than the one you were knitting with. (I've been knitting with a size nine, frogging with a size five) Using the smaller needle makes frogging easier but I don't know why.

2. Instead of going back row after row after row......use the smaller needle to go back and forth over the one row you have just frogged and look very carefully at each stitch. I have found that the yarnovers and two or more stitches knitted together are easily messed up when frogging and that problem has, in most cases, explained the incorrect number of stitches I have after I frog the row with the mistake in it.

I suppose these things sound very elementary, but I didn't know them, and boy howdee, has learning them saved me a lot of time.

Now back to knitting!

[I still don't know if I will like this project, but I am way too stubborn to give up on it now.]

Why I Gave Up Knitting

for about ten years.

When I moved to Georgia from Florida, I thought: Now I can knit again!!! There wasn't much inspiration to knit in Florida, with weather that was rarely cool, let alone cold. There wasn't the variety of non-wool fibers that we have now -silks, bamboo, lovely cottons. At least not in the only yarn shop anywhere near me.

What did I pick for my first project? The lovely sweater above. I mean, who wouldn't want shoulders like that? Gaw-jus. And what yarn did I choose? 100% black mohair. Big mistake. I had never knit with mohair and had never knit with such a dark color. I bought bamboo needles, another mistake.

I struggled for months with this project. I couldn't tell the stitches apart because the black mohair was so....mohair-y. That meant I couldn't get a reliable stitch count. As time went on, the black dye from the mohair penetrated the needles, turning them black. Then I REALLY couldn't see details.

I kept knitting, swearing, knitting, swearing. For months. And months. And then I gave up. I put the whole mess away in a closet, and decided that until I finished that sweater, I wouldn't knit anything else.

Amateur!!!!! I know better now. I always have multiple projects going at once, with others hibernating.

Well, that sweater hibernated for about ten years, until first granddaughter was born. I took the sweater out of Siberia, studied it, and threw the whole thing (except for the knitting needles) away. Again, what an amateur. I couldn't have frogged the sweater; the mohair was too stubborn to take out, but I could have kept the unused yarn for another project.

What's done is done, but I wish I had known then what I know now. I wouldn't have: a. bought that particular project; b. stopped knitting; c. thrown the whole thing out.

With age comes wisdom - I hope.

Which of These Things Is Not Like the Others?

OK, so this doesn't work when there are only two things, but do you see a problem here??? Well, I do. But I didn't until I was one row away from starting the toe decreases on sock two.

Take a good look at the heels (oops, one sock is upside down):















Yup. For some reason, I switched back to the striping yarn before I turned the heel on sock #2. But I didn't notice until way, way too late, unless I wanted to frog the whole foot, which I didn't. These socks have been a series of mistakes from the very beginning of sock #1.
Mistake #1: I don't remember what it was, but I had to start over fairly soon after beginning.
Mistake #2: I picked up the OTN sock and enthusiastically started knitting. Many rows later I noticed something odd. There was a hole, and the brown striping zigged when it should have zagged. Ooops, a short row. I didn't realize I had knitted in the wrong direction. Ribbit, ribbit...
Mistake #3: The yarn is called Paca-Ped HT. The HT, of course, means "heel" and "toe." So I just used the solid brown yarn as reinforcing yarn for the heel flap. At the time, I did wonder why the reinforcement yarn was a solid color, and why it was as thick as the sock yarn. Well, I tell you, it made for one thick, sturdy heel. Duh. It was for contrasting heels and toes, just like the picture on the yarn label!!!!! Frogged it.

So on sock #2, I was destined to do something wrong. Today after I discovered my mistake, I took the pair, with #2 still OTN, to my LYS. My knitter friends there said that since the socks were not a gift, I should just leave them as is. They reminded me that The Yarn Harlot says that there are no knitting police. If there were, I think that they might take away my needles. However, in my defense, I started these months ago, just before I damaged my knee and needed surgery. Also, my thumb has been in a brace forEVER and that doesn't help any.

Some people say that the yarn tells you what to do, and I believe this yarn was telling me to just, for Dog's sake, finish and go on to something else. So I am...