Yarnification

Okay, here’s the proof that I’m done. You may now point and giggle.

Damn, but this poor thing has issues. Not even considering the dyelot problem since I was using scrap yarn, same color/mixed dyelots, wow is this ever bad:
1) The chevrons go all wonky every so often. This is because I apparently do not know how to count.
2) Somehow the front of the project became the back a little ways in (see bottom of photo).
3) Those holes. Ack. I managed to stop doing that about halfway through.
4) Abrupt gauge change a little over halfway through. I think that was the point where my purl stitches stopped being quite so sloppy.

(With regard to general inability to count, when I went to proofread this I noticed that list up there was numbered 1, 2, 2, 3. I am not kidding.)

But I finished it, and I think I can knit now. I thought I could before, kinda, but I found out how mistaken I was while I was doing this.

Oh, and binding off. Should I be using a bigger needle to bind off? It was like I was strangling the poor thing to death, and it’s really, really tight at the top edge.

(Clickable.)

Yep, I’ll put up a pic soon. Feel free to giggle at it. (No, really, it’s bad. But I’ll take a picture of it anyway.)

I’m finding out that I do all this crafty stuff because it drives me stark raving mad not to have something to keep my hands busy. I’ve been trying to take it easy on my wrists because they’ve been acting up a little. Not a lot, but I’ll be driving and I go to shift gears and get this weird zingpingblat of nerve pain, and that’s not good, right? And it’s really for the best if I give it a rest *before* it gets real bad rather than after.

So I’m trying to lay off anything that could be considered “repetitive strain”.

It’s not easy. I have a serious excess of nervous energy and I need to do SOMETHING with it.

The very sad dishcloth is finished, so I’ve proven to myself that I really can knit. At one point I was pretty sure that it wasn’t going to happen and I really only kept at it out of sheer cussedness.

The first half of it looks AWFUL. But the second half of it has no holes and hardly any misplaced stitches. It’s more of trapezoid than a square because about two thirds of the way into it my gauge up and tightened up.

I started a second one that’s looking infinitely better so far than the first one. I’m only a few rows in but it just looks so much better.

I did a row or two on the dishcloth yesterday, but that was pretty much all I could manage.

You might recall my whining about my hands bothering me a few months ago? I hadn’t had much trouble from them lately; I started taking some herbal stuff (ginkgo biloba) for something else, and when I stopped taking it I noticed that my hands started hurting again after a few days. I was curious if it was that, so I took it for a week, stopped taking it for a week, etc. a couple of times until I decided that it really was helping with that. A couple of days on it and my hands feel better, a couple of days off it and they feel worse. I think it’s got some sort of anti-inflammatory effect. I’ll take what I can get; I can’t take advil or anything in that family (wheeeeeze!)

But yesterday afternoon it started up again, first the joints in my thumbs and then gradually in other fingers swelled up and went all wacky. It got worse as the day went on, but it’s way better today.

I think it might’ve been the weather, honestly. There was a massive front moving in to replace our lovely 60° day with 30°-and-dropping today, complete with near-hurricane force winds last night.

Feeling about 70% better today, so I’m hoping to get more done on it later on…

I don’t have a new photo today; just picture the last one, only twice as big and with not so many mistakes in the second half. Something strange is going on at one edge. I am ignoring it and keeping at it.

Unless I’m guessing way wrong, I think I may have time to finish this one and a second one, the second one hopefully being better-looking than this one.

I still have no notion of how I managed to turn the front into the back all those days ago—I’ve knitted lots of little squares before (just never managed to get anywhere with an actual project) and never had that happen. It hasn’t happened again, though.

My hope is that someday I’ll be able to knit as fast as I can crochet, or nearly so, anyway. It feels like I could’ve crocheted ten dishcloths in the time I’ve spent on this one. But then the goal here wasn’t really to make a dishcloth, but to get better at knitting…

I’m late to the party with this one. Actually I generated it and uploaded it a while ago but forgot to post it. (D’oh!) Hey, look, Mr. Doo is in my word cloud!

(You can get one here if there’s anyone out there who wants one and hasn’t already done it yet.)

That’s all for now, I think. No knitting pictures today. I got about fifteen or so rows done last night, but I’m feeling a little discouraged.

I only have a couple of minutes right now so I’m slapping up photos. Will come back and edit if I can—work is a little crazy today—otherwise I’ll post more tomorrow.

I made another accidental hole. Both times I ended up with one stitch too many at the end of a row. The Reader’s Digest book says a yarn-over increase will create a hole; maybe that’s what I’m doing by accident.

New weirdness: When I picked it up the next day and started working on it again, the front inexplicably became the back and vice versa. There’s a freaky-looking dent at the point where I entered a parallel universe and back became front and front back. I do not know what I did, but I’m persevering anyway. Ever since that point, it’s been coming along more or less smoothly apart from an occasional misplaced knit or purl.

Progress so far:
Last night I started out with a different pattern than what I’d picked out because I left the original pattern at work (oops). After doing the first six rows three times (twice because I have not mastered the art of retrieving a dropped stitch and once because everything just suddenly went haywire) and becoming unexpectedly thwarted at the same place each time, I grew to hate that pattern with the fire of a thousand suns. That’s about what I expected to happen, really. Also the pattern would have made a dishcloth that was about 10½ inches square and I really prefer a much smaller one.

Then I dug out my Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Needlework. I picked out a pattern stitch (the chevron seed stitch pattern, I think, but I don’t have the book with me so I can’t say for sure). Well, actually I kept dithering, so I showed a page to Don and told him, “Here, pick out something on this page. But not the second one, because I don’t think I can do that.” The one he picked was the one I was leaning toward, so it all worked out.

This is the first time I’ve ever tried to knit anything other than garter stitch or stockinette. I took the pattern stitch in the book and just added a knit to the beginning and end of each row because if I try to start a row in purl, it’s really not a pretty sight.

I’m something like eight rows into it, and I’ve developed a problem. Here’s the whole thing (ooh! lookee! you can see the chevrons kinda-sorta starting to build up!):

And here’s one that shows the problem (there’s another problem—or twelve— that you can probably see, but I’m most concerned about the hole):

What’s up with that hole? What did I do? Okay, I can tell you this much:
1) Somewhere around the row where the hole formed, I had to undo bunch of stitches because I miscounted the knits and the purls. I’m not real comfortable with doing that in knitting—I end up dropping stitches and scrapping the whole thing and starting over. (So you begin to see why I’ve never finished a knit project, ever, right?)
2) Also somewhere around that row, I discovered I had 35 stitches, as opposed to the 34 stitches I was supposed to have. I couldn’t figure out exactly where I went wrong and said to hell with it and just knit the last two stitches on that row together because that’s where I was when I discovered there was an extra stitch.

So what happened there? Should I scrap it since I’m not too far in and start over? The danger there is that I’m expecting to conjure up this perfect dishcloth with no mistakes in it, and I could spend the next week doing six rows and then starting over. But that hole—that’s pretty awful. (Also the yarn seems to be feeling a bit overwrought from being knitted over and over again; if I start again I’m going to have to come up with some different yarn.)

I’m tempted to just keep going since I know I could start and make a mistake and start over and make a mistake ad infinitum and never get this thing done. Am I expecting too much for a first project? Is this why I’ve never finished a knit project before?

I also wanted to link to this post by Beadlizard about ergonomics and whatnot because I should really go back and re-read it once a day.

I spent a couple of hours working on the Seraphina shawl last night. It’s pretty close to being done. It needs either another two or six rows; I’m not sure yet which. I need to try it on again after I finish the current repeat and see how it looks. After the last try-on it was almost the size I wanted it.

It’s funny how easy that pattern has turned out to be. I was so intimidated by the instructions and all the photos, and it’s certainly the longest pattern I have. But since getting the basic pattern established I haven’t needed to look at the pattern at all.

I’m making it out of RH Symphony, which, based on how warm I’ve been while working on it, should make for a really cozy, lightweight, warm shawl. I’m thinking it’ll take about two and a half to three skeins all told; I’m on my third skein now but I don’t think I’ll use the whole thing before it’s done. That’ll leave me a full skein and maybe a little extra to make something else. I haven’t decided what just yet—I’m thinking a scarf, maybe Donna’s Alternating Windowpanes scarf.

Oh, and I think I’ve settled on what to do for my first felting project with the yarn Lori sent me! Recently Dawn posted this terrific felted bag pattern: Felted Memo Bag and I really want to make one. I think that dark autumn red will make a great-looking bag, and this bag is very much my style.

I should have a photo of the Petite Pineapple doily very soon. It’s all finished and everything, just keep forgetting to upload a photo.

On the to-do list:

Lining a purse and curtain tie-backs, both of which involve sewing. (And I’m sure I explained this before, but the sewing machine is stored in the mud room, weighs eleventy-billion pounds, and I’ve been having back trouble, so I’ve been off the sewing—ha! I say that like I sew all the time or something—because it really sucks to end up with a massive muscle spasm just from setting up the machine. I’m trying to convince my back to behave itself without going back to the doctor for more steroids.)

A pair of socks, halfway through the second sock. Bad case of Second Sock Syndrome right there. But I was wearing my first pair of crochet socks the other day and started thinking how very nice it would be if I finished up this second pair sometime in this lifetime so I could have more fun stripey socks.

And, coming sooner than I’d realized:

Dishcloth ahoy! I need to:
* Get a pair of size 7 needles (I have two sets, one size 9 and one size super-freaky-huge which is what I used to learn to purl so I could better see what was going on).
* Do a gauge swatch to make sure that size will work. (I already know the size 9 needles are way too big because I already did one swatch.)
* Put aside other projects and obsessive mandolin-plinking once the big day arrives. (Friday! Whee!)

I reserve the right to decide I hate this pattern with the sort of passionate hatred I generally reserve for things like sauerkraut or scrubbing floors, but no later than two days after the Olympics start because if I do any pattern-switching any later than that, there’s a solid chance that I won’t finish on account of I’m still slow at knitting, and I’ve got my hands pretty full with work right now and have been working longer hours than usual.

And…I think that’s it. I’ve deemed those unidentifiable thread projects a loss; none of them were far enough along for it to be worth the effort of figuring out which pattern and what size hook I was using (there were a handful of them but none of them seemed to have more than a couple of rounds done).

I’ll be back when I manage to get that photo uploaded.