Ripping Out September 11, 2008

Today I eagerly wound up my JitterBug yarn and anticipated starting my socks tonight.  This evening I cast on for the Bintje Socks and started going.  While we were watching a movie, I started on the round where you join the cast on stitches with the current stitches you are working on to create the cuff.  In theory it sounds very easy.  But, leave it to me to misunderstand the directions and completely eff it up.  I was unsure how I would knit the c/o stitches with the live ones and didn’t know how I would be able to simply stitch them with my darning needle either.  So I went the only route that made sense to me and that was to pick up stitches from the c/o row and then do a ssk like stitch.  It was going along merrily until the last dpn where I snapped it in half.  And the only person I have to blame for that is myself.  Along the way one of my needles started to get curved from the precarious position I was putting them into and I thought that I could slightly curve it back.  And then SNAP!  Being a smartass my husband asked me if I was Hulk knitting.

After that I rearranged my stitches and took a look at the next set of directions.  It was here that I realized in doing my version of the cuff, I twisted all the stitches so it looked pretty ugly.  For a minute I honestly considered letting it be and getting on with my life.  But I knew that I would hate ths sock and never wear it if I didn’t correct myself.  Plus the adorable cuff of the sock is one of the many reasons I chose to knit it.  *sigh*  But all hope wasn’t lost yet at this point.  I was thinking that I could rip back to the part where you join the stitches and simply knit them together with no dpn’s holding my live stitches, they would (hopefully) sit there and be patient.  But as I was organizing myself, my yarn slowly slipped out of more and more stitches until I was forced to admit defeat and simply rip everything out.

My husband re rolled my yarn while I ripped and my kitty kept his huge green eyes on the yarn that dangled in front of his face.  He swiped at it a couple times but after a few remonstrations from myself, contented to gaze greedily at it instead and wait for my attention to wane.

Tomorrow’s another day for me to begin anew and I now know what my plan of attack is.  I’m thinking that instead of beginning with the dpn’s, I will simply knit the first 13 rows on straight needles, create the cuff, and then change to my dpn’s.  In her pictures she illustrates how to join the stitches on a straight needle and I am more confident in myself to simply begin with straight needles and then change to the dpn’s instead of flip flopping between the two a few times.  Wish me luck!

Start over from scratch June 22, 2008

I was listening to a podcast yesterday (sorry I can’t remember the name!) and she asked what kind of knitter are you.  Well, I guess I am the kind of knitter who has a large tendency to scrap things.

I’ve been diligently working on a sweater from the domiKNITrix book over the past week.  There were a couple of tiny mistakes that were too far down the line for me to bother fixing.  Plus I figured this was my trial sweater, so it wasn’t a big deal, right?  I got to the body shaping part where you do 2 LLI and 2 RRI.  I worked out the numbers on how to evenly decrease 13 stitches and then wrote out the numbers to follow my increases and purl and knit stitches.  Two rounds into last part, I discover that I have completely misread the instructions and everything was off.  When I did my decrease, I wound up only doing 12, but I didn’t worry too much about it since I ended up with the same amount of stitches I was supposed to.  But I misread the numbers and started off with 110 stitches on my needles instead of 106.  With 106 I would be able to get to 128 with 5 more repeats.  Using the 110, I’d get to 126 after 4 and would need to knit 2 extra the last time.  I’m not sure how terrible that woudl look, but I re-evaluated my knitting and to my chagrin, that tiny mistake I made early on did make a big difference.  I began to tear out my knitting and not even upset.  I wanted to fix it.  But as I started ripping it out and rerolling it back on to my skein, I felt overwhelmed by how much I would have to rip out and how much I didn’t want to do that.  So instead I cut the strands and let it go.

My intention was to start again, but I don’t have enough yarn of the same color to attempt another go at it.  Plus I’m on strike from yarn at Wal-Mart, but I think I just may have to sneak over there and buy some.  😦  To make myself feel better, I did buy some beautiful yarn from KnitPicks yesterday.

I know I posted that I was going to knit a purse yesterday.  Nothing has come to fruitation.  Mostly because I get so far into it and feel like it looks terrible and scrap it.  I’ve just been feeling finicky and picky and uninspired by everything I see.  If the library is open today, I should really swing by and see if they have any knitting books.  I keep waiting for the perfectly awesome pattern to appear before my eyes and then I’ll work it into a purse.  Or if the current lime green yarn I have now wasn’t so crappy I’d knit a blanket.

The yarn is another reason I’ve been having trouble sticking to anything.  Most of what I’ve got is this itchy scratchy crappy cheap Red Heart yarn that, in a word, just sucks.  So attempting to create anything beautiful out of it has been trying on my imagination.  Plus since I scrapped the one thing that was semi going right for me, I’m finding it hard to jump back on the horse.