Cosmic Smack Down

So I was knitting along happily on my new sweater and finished the body and hood, and then I hit a snag. Not a major snag, but one that required me to take a little break. Feeling the need for a little mindless knitting, I pulled out the Noro Log Cabin blanket that's been waiting patiently for a while. If you recall--as I did--I had finished all the squares and assembled them into strips. No mean feat, that, since it required miles and miles of garter stitch and grafting. But I persevered and conquered and all that, and I distinctly recall the relief with which I put all those assembled strips away in a basket to await the final assembly, requiring more miles and miles of garter stitch and grafting. At some point, I even got the first two strips put together, with three left to go.

All this I remembered, and I pulled out the blanket with some sense that, if I couldn't yet see the light at the end of the tunnel, at least I was beginning to believe there might be a light at the end of the tunnel.

I knitted and knitted and knitted, with a growing concern that the ancient and discontinued yarn I was using for the assembly might run out before the blanket did. I grafted and grafted and grafted, and finally the third strip joined the first two on the blanket and it was good:

At this point I paused and assessed the yarn situation. After some thought and some calculating and a little bit of unwarranted optimism, I decided I just might have enough to finish the assembly and put on a border. Maybe.

With a renewed sense of purpose, I reached into the basket to pull out the fourth strip and found this:

Those are not strips.

Those are individual squares.

I distinctly remember strips.

This not only means I have to invest god-only-knows-how-many-more hours in assembling these b*&!^%$s into strips--it also means there is no-freakin'-way I have enough ancient, discontinued yarn to finish both the assembly and the border.

*&%!

And at the same time...

At this point in my knitting career, there are certain things I have learned and expect myself to remember and apply. Things like "knit a swatch." We all know that gauge lies, but failing to even make the effort is just throwing it in the face of the Knitting Goddess.

And "being careful not to twist." Unless you enjoy casting an entire sweater body's worth of stitches onto a circular needle and working four or so rounds before you discover that you have invented a wholly new--and probably impossible--geometric construct.

Oh, and "make a copy of your pattern" is always good to remember. I learned that one when I dropped my knitting magazine in the pool while we were on vacation, halfway through that complex lace sweater I was working on. Blowing a soggy magazine with a hair dryer for an hour does not guarantee a legible pattern at the end.

But by far the one that has burned me the most often--and the most viciously--is "and at the same time." You know what I mean: you're knitting along steadily, following the charts for cables or lace or colorwork, and all of a sudden you turn the page and read "and at the same time" and you feel all the blood drain out of your head as you learn that you should have started the decreases for the body 70 rows ago. And for a minute you wonder if anyone will notice that the fitted sweater you were knitting has morphed into a football jersey and that there is no left armhole.

We all know that you are supposed to read the pattern through from beginning to end to prevent this sort of thing from happening. In theory, at least, you will remember while you are knitting that there are some other things that are supposed to happen along the way--preferably before you knit those 70 rows that you're going to have to rip out. In my case, reality seldom conforms to theory, and so I have learned not only to read ahead, but to highlight the words "and at the same time" every time I come across them...even when I'm reading a book or newspaper, because you can just never be too careful.

So I am at a loss to explain how I could have forgotten, in working the right front of Spicy Tweed, that there is waist shaping that is supposed to be worked "at the same time." This failure is rendered more inexplicable by the fact that I had already worked this very same waist shaping on the back and the left front. But I never cease to amaze myself with my own ingenuity in finding ways to screw up my knitting. And so, gentle reader, instead of showing you two half-completed fronts of Spicy Tweed, I am showing you...nothing. You will have to take my word for it that I have been knitting diligently toward completing my WIP Cup project. I even knitted in the car today on the way to and from Julian with the kids fighting in the back seat and a hefty dog sitting in my lap. (The KH was driving. I'm a multi-tasker, but not quite that multi.)

Alas, tonight I will be ripping out all that knitting so that I can re-knit the waist shaping "at the same time."

Someone pass the chocolate and wine.

Hear That?

That's the sound of the Knitting Goddess laughing.

This is where I ran out of yarn on the bind off. $#%&!

Coming Unraveled

I finished Clue 1 for Enchanted Wood a few days ago (ahead of schedule!), and since the next clue won't be out until the 22nd, I picked up my current pair of socks to fill the gap. I made such good progress that by the end of American Idol last night, I had two socks that looked like this:

All they needed was a bind off.

Ordinarily, I would have gone to bed then, but I was so close to the finish that I figured I'd just stay up a little later and get them bound off.

Does anyone else hear the Knitting Goddess cackling?

I got about ten stitches into the bindoff of the first sock when I discovered I had somehow dropped a stitch while binding off. I started tinking back. The bindoff I'm using involves knitting two stitches, slipping them back to the left needle, then knitting them through the back loops. This makes a nice, stretchy edge for toe-up socks. It is also absolutely impossible to tink back. After two hours and a raging desire for a bottle of Xanax, I had one sock ready for its bind off and one sock that looked like this:

Oh, yeah. It's not pretty, folks.

But for once, I'm proud to say, I recognized bitter reality while it was staring me in the face and bowed to the inevitable. I stuffed the sock back into its bag and went to bed.

Comfort Spinning

While I was waiting for the KG to release my knitting from purgatory (or wherever the heck it was while I was looking for it), I put my usual knitting time to use on some comfort spinning:

This is roving from FiberOptik Yarns. I bought a four ounce braid of superwash merino and a four ounce braid of merino/bamboo, both in the colorway Green Dolphin Street, spun them separately and plied them together. Because each fiber takes dye differently, there is a lovely depth to the finished yarn. This skein is the first half. I've spun up the rest, but it needs to be wound off and washed.

I love the finished yarn so much that I think I may buy more of these fibers and spin enough for a Clapotis, which I've (gasp!) never made before. Or maybe I'll just carry the yarn around and pet it instead.

Lost and...

Found!

Phew!

For those who are wondering: car trunk. Where I'd already looked twice. Must be one of those space/time continuum things.

Cosmic Smack-Down

I knew I shouldn't have risked lace.

When the cast on couldn't discourage me, the ripping couldn't break my spirit, and the p5tog learned I was more persistent than previous evidence would indicate, the Knitting Goddess had to take a new approach. I discovered a whole new way to screw up lace.

I LOST IT!

Yep. I lost an entire shawl in progress, yarn and needles still attached. Somewhere between spinning group on Friday and sitting down to knit Saturday evening, it disappeared!

%&*$#@!

Knit, Rip, Repeat

You'll notice there is no picture of my progress on Swallowtail today. That is because, despite several hours of knitting, it looks exactly the same as yesterday. I knew I shouldn't have taunted the Knitting Goddess.

I happily knitted quite a few rows with apparent resounding success. I was even marveling over how quickly it was going. I was thinking, maybe I've finally kicked my lace knitting curse. And then I noticed I had one stitch too many at the end of a row.

Now, a sensible knitter would look at that, see that the error wasn't obvious, knit two together, and move on. At least, that's what I now think. At the time, I thought a sensible knitter would spend three and a half hours trying to track down the error, discover an extra yarn over, carefully tink back, realize the yarn over was actually two rows down, ladder down to the extra yarn over, remove it, work back up, discover that the stitches were far too loose, carefully tug the extra yarn from stitch to stitch, distributing the extra over the entire row, finally smooth out the work to see how it looked...and realize she had removed the wrong damned yarn over. Guess which sort of knitter I am?

Of course, when I moved on to the actual wrong yarn over, and attempted to repeat the procedure, a hole opened up in the space/time continuum and the universe collapsed in on itself, taking my knitting with it.

By the time I extricated it, half the shawl had been ripped back and my husband was giving me his wary lion-tamer look and suggesting I "just put it down...just for a little while. You can have it back tomorrow."

And now it's tomorrow, and I'm back to where I started yesterday. Somewhere in there, I must have crossed over the International Date Line.

Still Alive!

Yes, I'm still alive, but I don't blame you if you wondered. Blogger didn't even recognize me when I signed on. The kids are on Spring Break this week, and if you have kids, you already know where I've been. Between feeding them (and all their friends, who have also been here all week), shoveling laundry, breaking up fights, and running Mom's Taxi Service, I haven't had time for much else.

We celebrate both Passover and Easter (both this week), and--oh, yeah--our good friend is turning 60 on Saturday and my parents' 50th wedding anniversary is next week, and guess who gets to throw the party? Remind me to tell you all about that family drama sometime...when it's all over.

This morning I had a doctor's appointment I scheduled last month that absolutely had to happen exactly today...so of course, my husband got an emergency case two days ago that went to trial when? Yep. This morning. I left my children alone together for the very first time. I have left them each home alone individually before, but never together (they're nine and eleven). Today I just didn't feel like I had a choice. I posted my cell phone number by the phone and held my cell phone in my hand through the entire appointment (although what I could have done for them with my feet in the stirrups, I don't know). And then the doctor was unable to complete the procedure, and I have to go back this afternoon to try again (nothing serious, I assure you, but rather time-sensitive). I'll have to take the kids with me, too, since one of them has to be at a violin lesson less than an hour after my scheduled appointment time...

Just to demonstrate how crazed I've been, this is what I cast on last night:

LACE!!!

If that isn't proof of my complete loss of control, I don't know what is. That's Swallowtail (do I really need to link to it?)--again. I think this is my third attempt at this pattern. The others are best not spoken of in polite company. This time, it only took me four tries to get the cast on right. *sigh* But the yarn is sort of my reward for the struggle. The picture does not do it justice. This is my own handspun, and, at the risk of throwing my hubris in the face of the Knitting Goddess, I can tell you this is the best yarn I have ever made (which admittedly is not saying much). It's the only yarn I've ever been able to spin that might actually make decent lace, although it's really somewhere between fingering and dk weight. But Swallowtail is a tiny shawl, and I wanted something bigger, so that's okay. So far, I seem to have slipped under the KG's radar with this one, but it's still early in the game. Stay tuned for the rest of the saga! And now I have to run. The doctor is waiting.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

I measured for a 24" zipper. I special ordered a 24" zipper. This is not a 24" zipper. Clearly. I can hear the Knitting Goddess chuckling from here.

Dear Knitting Goddess:

You win.

Dickinson it is.

Seriously?

Halfway through the second sleeve, I've run out of yarn.

Score:
KG: 12
Knitter: 0

Keeping My Head Down

After my recent string of knitting disasters, I'm just keeping my head down. I finished a sock:

I'm hoping the Knitting Goddess will accept the kitchenering of the toe as my penance and let me off the hook already. But I doubt it. I had to cast on the second sock four times before I got it right. It's a simple k2, p2 rib, but I tried to cast on with a single circular, and apparently my brain doesn't work that way. I knitted two different mobius cuffs before I gave up and cast on with dpns, then knitted it onto a circular.

I've also accepted the fact that Sligo is not going to fit. I only came to this conclusion after I knitted several more repeats of the lace pattern, so I'm not feeling too bright about that either. I was heading for a 34" chest, and based on my swatch, it wasn't going to grow any with blocking. I was using size 5 needles and the knitting was pretty tight. I couldn't bring myself to actually rip out all that lace, so I pulled out another ball to swatch yet again. It turns out I can get perfect gauge on size 7s--exactly as the pattern recommends. Who'd have thought? And although the fabric is a little looser than I would like, it is acceptable, and probably the only way I'm going to get a sweater that fits. I've cast on (for the third time) and I'm quietly working away, hoping to escape any more unwanted attention from the KG.

Maybe one of you could...oh, I don't know...start knitting without swatching, or buy only exactly as much discontinued yarn as the pattern calls for, or loudly proclaim your disdain for the KG and distract her for me for just a little while. Please?

In Which the KG Takes Her Revenge. Again.

Two hours. That's how long it took me to produce this swatch.

Two hours, and three needle sizes, and a flip chart for the lace pattern. It's not as easy as it looks. Not only is this a "true" lace, in that every row is a pattern row--no resting on the wrong side--but it also incorporates an "eight stitch cable" that requires not one but two cable needles to execute. You have to slip one stitch to the front on one needle, slip six stitches to the back on another needle, knit one, then work the six back stitches in a knit and purl pattern, then finally knit the first stitch from the first cable needle. If you didn't quite get that, imagine my struggles to figure out how to execute it without using any cable needles. I did, eventually. It requires some interesting acrobatics that leave my wrists a bit sore, but it beats trying to hang onto all those different cable needles.

Imagine, then, how long it took to produce this:

Now double that, because I knitted it twice. Not for fun, you understand. In all that swatching (and I even washed my swatches and measured them after blocking), I came to the conclusion that I liked the yarn best knitted at a somewhat smaller gauge than the pattern called for. After a bit of quality time with my calculator, I decided that I could use my gauge and just knit one size up and end up with the right size. So I cast on for the L/XL and worked about 25 rows. 25 140-stitch rows. Of lace.

Now I'll admit that it never really looked right. From the first row, I was questioning the sizing. It looked big. But I checked the numbers and everything worked out. So I kept knitting. It continued to look big. I checked the numbers again. I checked my gauge. I was a little off--maybe one stitch over four inches. But with a gauge of 26-28 stitches to four inches, this didn't seem terribly important. By the time I was nearing the end of the first lace repeat, though, there was no denying that this thing was going to be huge. I stopped and measured again. And now I was getting the original gauge specified in the pattern, and was in fact knitting a 42.5" chest for my 35" bust. There was nothing to do but rip it all out.

I bit the bullet and ripped. Then I turned on American Idol and cast on again, this time using the S/M pattern. By the time Simon was slinging his final insult, I was feeling pretty good about my progress. I did notice that some of my stitches were not as tight as they should be and made a conscious effort to tighten things up a bit.

Which may be why, when I pulled it out again today, it looked a little...small. Yes indeed. I am now knitting a size XS. Instead of a 37.5" chest, I am knitting a 34.5" chest. I am a little miffed. I'm not a slave to gauge. I see it as a suggestion rather than an absolute. I don't worry too much about my knits growing or stretching a bit, because that is the nature of knitting. It stretches. It grows. It changes when exposed to water or steam or normal wear. So it doesn't matter all that much to me if I'm off by half a stitch over four inches or a couple inches in the finished product, which is why I generally don't swatch as...rigorously...as some knitters do. But this time I did swatch rigorously. I swatched and I washed and I blocked and I calculated, and the end result is just as screwed up as it could possibly be had I thrown caution to the wind and just started knitting.

So the obvious dilemma is this: I have now knitted this sweater in both the S/M and L/XL sizes, and there was eight inches difference between the two with the two entirely different gauges I seem to have gotten with the same yarn and same needles. So what do I do? Keep working on the current version and trust in the magic of blocking? Rip and re-knit the larger size, even though I know it will probably end up being way too big? Rip the thing and pretend I never saw this pattern? Throw myself on the mercy of the Knitting Goddess, who is clearly not done with me yet, and beg her forgiveness for ever daring to cast on in the first place? After the endless labor of Death By Cables and the unfinished disaster of the Retro Ribby Shrug, I could really use a win here. What do you think?

Cheating

It's come to this. As if cheating on Death By Cables with the Retro Ribby Shrug weren't bad enough...now I'm cheating on the RRS with Sligo. Shameless, that's what I am. A project hussy.

The RRS is done. At least, the knitting part is done. It has a back, two fronts, and two sleeves, just waiting to be blocked and sewn together.

Usually, I'm pretty gung-ho about finishing. I don't like the sewing (if I wanted to sew, I'd, you know, sew), but I generally hop right to it once the knitting is done, because--let's face it--you can't really walk around with the individual pieces pinned to your shirt and call it a sweater. (Although some of us may have been tempted to try it.)

But even though the RRS was an exciting fling, and a very quick knit, the thrill is gone, and I'm seeing it in the harsh light of day with its curlers and its house coat, and I'm getting that wandering urge. I'm having a hard time resisting the siren's song of Sligo (so green...so green...). And Death? I've sent Death on a long vacation while I reconsider the relationship . I'm going with Bea's reasoning: "you have to look at your WIPs in relation to the season, WIPs for fall and winter 'stay' in that season, when spring comes, you start over at 0." Have you ever heard such a piece of knitterly brilliance in your life? Even the Knitting Goddess can't possibly argue with that reasoning!

Falling Down

I was doing really well with my vow to finish Death By Cables before casting on anything new. I only made one bag and one baby blanket and started one pair of socks and the shrug part of the Retro Ribby Twinset. And none of those count, as I've explained repeatedly.

But I'm going down now, and I'm going down hard.

It's totally not my fault. The new Vogue Knitting came. This did not seem to pose a problem, since, as usual, I didn't like any of the designs.

And then I found this:

I like this. I like it a lot. I like it so much that it has jumped to the very front of the queue. Death By Cables? Who needs a cabled wool sweater in San Diego in April? So I immediately started shopping for yarn. And then I remembered this:

This is the gorgeous, hand-dyed, superwash merino from Sharon's shop, in the Sligo colorway (she just posted some BFL in this same colorway, and it's totally different and absolutely lovely). I love this yarn. It's soft and smooth and lightly variegated and it's green, which aside from being possibly my new favorite color is also the Project Spectrum color for April. I've just been waiting to cast it on until Death was finished. But, you know, if I use yarn from stash...

...it doesn't really count as a new project.

New Project? What New Project?

This is not a new project. It may look like a new project; it may smell like a new project; it may even feel like a new project--but it is not.

This is a UFO. It is true that I just cast it on, but that does not make it a new project. I planned to make it last year. I even made the first half of it last year. Do you remember this?

This is the tank from the Retro Ribby Twinset in Knitting Lingerie Style. I made it last spring. I intended to make the shrug shortly thereafter, but I got sidetracked by Prosperous, and then Grecian Plaits, and Icarus, and by the time I thought of it again, it was fall, and I wasn't interested in a tank and shrug.

The status of this project is crucial. I still have not finished Death By Cables. Which means I still have not fulfilled my oath to the Knitting Goddess, and we all know what a b*tch she can be when you mess with her. I am not brave enough to fly in the face of her potential wrath by casting on anything new. We have already established that gift knitting does not qualify as "new." Neither do socks, because, well...just because. And of course, a UFO cannot be classified as "new." Right? So I figure I'm safe with this one. It's not a shrug; it's a twinset. Big difference. It is part of an unfinished project, not a whole new one. It's all in the details, people.

You've got my back on this, right?