Continuation of previous post, updating y’all on Birthday Project the first.
It was all going so well.
I was following the pattern (although I like to treat food recipes as optional, I usually find that patterns make the results of knitting a lot more useable). I was churning out predictable, functional, working so far, sweater.
I took it to my “new” knitting group at my LYS knit-wise. Explaining the unconventional structure of the garment (knit across rather than up or down, and grafted at the center back (it’s an American pattern)) led Myra, proprietor of said LYS, to say “I’d be finding a way to avoid all that grafting. Why don’t you knit on round?”
This struck me as a very good idea.
So I did.
I made especially good progress during the few days I spent with Lorna, a long-time buddy, recently brought back into the knitting fold, at her mother’s house. We spent our mornings doing some light sight-seeing and old-haunt-revisiting, and our afternoons…. well…
I got past the second armhole… and started the frogging* on the Second Front.
See here, how knitting the cabling from the other end doesn’t alter how it looks enough to justify abandoning The Plan and knitting it as per the instructions.
Good progress was made. Properly good progress. During knitting the second front, I realised that I hadn’t really thought that hard about how much yarn was required, and was rapidly approaching a point where clearly there wasn’t enough yarn to have the full length sleeves that this jacket requires. I contacted Big Sis, who has, by now, duly acquired 3 more balls in the same colour and happily the same Dye lot. I haven’t yet dared to calculate if 3 extra will be enough, although I’m sure Myra & her calculator will disillusion me in no time (she was the one who confirmed that I was under yardage by Quite A Lot at a subsequent knitting group session).
I was quietly knitting away one evening, celebrating how very close to finishing I was (literally NO ROWS away from the end of the frogging) when it dawned on me that there seemed to be quite a few stitches at the top of the frogging when compared to the other side.
A horrible cold feeling ran up the back of my neck.
Back in the mists of what happenned several weeks ago, I had a hazy memory of the bottom pattern repeat not being absolutely flush with the bottom of the fabric, but… (and this is where things slowed down a lot) …3 stitches up from the bottom.
It dawned on me that there was no way to fix this without redoing it. Without, on this picture, wripping out from the lower knitting needle in the picture below, back to the higher needle, which is roughly positioned where the cabling starts.
It’s fair to say, I swore a lot. I tweeted the word “cock” several times, many of them in capitals. When I had got through that phase to the nearly crying phase, I went to bed. I avoided actual crying.
The following day I took the needle out, and saw what thing of beauty it will be once it’s knitted properly (*sigh*).
Then I undid the knitting it had taken me nearly 2 weeks to do, and started again. I also took a picture of the 63 rows worth of checking off patterns I had done, to remind myself what a bonehead I was.
I *had* been quite clever, and decided instead of re-writing the chart of the rows & pattern increments, I would just work from the bottom up of the chart instead of top down. In theory this worked. In practice, I just needed to remember to start the pattern IN THE RIGHT PLACE!!
Progress is again going well. I’m about half way through the frogging. Again.
* frogging, it turns out, is the term for the braiding & buttons on the front of military-style jackets that this cardigan is supposed to resemble. HOW IRONIC, then, that so much of the other kind of frogging should come into play here (oh, er spoiler alert, if you’re reading this before finishing the blog post. There’s frogging).
August 10th, 2010 | Category: *sigh*, Crafty So & So's | Comments Off
