Monday, February 21, 2005

Something to show off!

Well, let's see...the dashboard doesn't work in Netscape so well, so I'm going to try to do this..

The successful slippers!




This was super easy. Pattern from Bernat, but I couldn't find Lana anywhere, and Patons Classic Wool worked up just fine.

I'll post pictures tomorrow, I promise...

But the slippers are done. Aside from a seam problem and the fact that one slipper is slightly bigger than the other (perhaps more hot water will do the trick), they are beautiful.

Saturday, February 19, 2005

On to the next

I figured out what I did wrong on the sweater. I must have put the thing down in the middle of a row, which I know better than to do, and when I picked it up again I turned around the work, which is an interesting way to do a vertical decrease--but definitely not what I wanted to do. It's still sitting in the corner frogged back to where I changed yarns, and I don't want to look at it. I need to reneedle it, but I don't care. I want to do a few smaller projects before I come back to that one, despite the fact that it looks pretty good on the whole. I need to better understand the yarn, I think.

At any rate, so today I went by AC Moore and found some nifty inexpensive merino and decided to try my hand at felting. I now have a small trivet, and I'm about to embark on some slippers. No, I take that back; I'm five rows into the slippers.

I got some blue and grey and lime green in the wool, and some rose and light grey acrylic... just be fun to just play with knitting for a while and then come back to the hoodie. I swear, pictures soon, if anyone cares..

Friday, February 18, 2005

Dropping entire rows

20.5 inches up the back, I found a weird zig zag in my work. This has happened before, and I've been like, okay, whatever. But in my infinite curiosity to figure out what had happened, I decided to tink back a bit. I had dropped a stitch.

So I pulled the stitch up.

Only to find that by pulling this stitch up, I had another dropped stitch, TWO rows down. WTF?

I try again. Pull up two rows, inspect the threads....Wham. Another stitch slips down. Three rows. As I'm pulling that back into position, one of the threads turns into a gargantuan 2" loop shooting sideways out of the left side of the work.

So now I'm in dropped stitches, a gaping hole in my work that I will never be able to fix with a crochet hook, and about to cry. I had just semi-successfully changed yarns and had maybe an hour's worth of work left to do on the back when this happened. I go to bed.

This morning, I frogged four rows. (But you had only dropped three, you say, right?) The reason I had to frog four rows is that when I got to the dropped stitch, the working yarn did a U-turn in the middle of the row and headed back.

I had dropped half a row. I have no idea how I did that, but I had.

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

The sweater saga continues

Argh argh argh argh.

Yes, a sweater shouldn't be your second project, even if it's an easy beginner pattern.

About 18 inches up the back, I glanced at the RS of the sweater and found about 20 stitches of BUMP. Which made an interesting line, should I ever want to design something with interesting lines, but not now. So I ripped out two inches of stitches, capturing the row onto a smaller needle, and tried to knit over.

It looks even worse now. Blast it. Going to rerip tonight. Maybe I'll just tink this row and make sure everything is turned round the right way.

Aside from that it's going fine. Homespun is as aggravating as they say, but I seem to have gotten the hang of it, mechanics of actual knitting aside.