G. Knerd

When last we spoke, I was in a somewhat troublesome state.  I was at the end of the second strip of the Wedding Blanket, and had realized that the beginning of the strip:

Didn’t exactly look much like the end of the strip:

Namely, the problem was that I needed a few more rows to get the same effect on both ends.  Doing more rows, however, would cause this strip to be longer than the middle and also look funky in the tree panel, so that solution was right out.  Ignoring it was also a possibility (what I like to call The Amish Solution), but one that even non-knitters would be likely to recognize.

After sleeping on the problem, I came up with a solution – Knitting Plastic Surgery.

In regular Knitting Surgery, you do something very precise like unravel a few stitches for a few rows to get to a mistake and then knit them back in the right pattern.  In Knitting Plastic Surgery (a term that, according to Bing, has only been used once – by SJ on a post by limedragon), I’m going to claim that one is engaging in Knitting Surgery in order to lessen – but not fix – a mistake.  (Note: this is not how SJ is using it in her comment – what she’s referring to is what I call regular Knitting Surgery.)

Armed with my new plan, I immediately took the four worst offending stitches and unraveled them to two rows past the cable cross.

I then picked up the remaining stitches with the left needle.

Instead of following the pattern (which would here have me knit two rows plain before crossing the cables), I immediately crossed them, thus allowing me to have three rows of plain knitting after the cross instead of one.  That makes the edge noticeably better, without being a hugely obvious mistake in the shortened distance between crossings.

And with that, I’m calling this panel done.  In fact, I’ve been working so hard (while I haven’t been blogging) that this panel is cast off and I’m already almost half done with the third – and final – panel.  It’s amazing what a deadline can do for a project…

I really, really wish I had time to put the Wedding Blanket in time out right now. Also, I probably deserve a smack upside the head.

Why?  Well, this is what the beginning of the current panel looks like.

And, with one row to do before the cast off edge, this is what the other edge looks like.

If you can’t see the problem (the conditions aren’t great and I took the pics on my cell), I seem to need about five more rows in order to make the top look like the bottom. However, I’m only going to get one.

And why do I deserve a smack?  Because (although I’m too tired to confirm this right now), I’m pretty sure I could have avoided this by starting the cable twists two rows sooner.  Maybe.  I might need a quiet room and a lot of graph paper to confirm that.

I think this is a sign that I’m done for tonight.  Hopefully I can figure it all out (and what I can do to fix it) tomorrow.

I’ve got exactly one month until the Wedding Blanket is due.  One.  Luckily, it’s a 31-day month, if it were February I’d be screwed.

Who am I kidding?  I’m screwed no matter how you slice it.  I’ve been knitting on this thing since May, and I’m not quite 2/3rds done.  I’m only marginally sure that I’m more than half way done.

Unfortunately (for the knitting, at least), last week The Blanket Thief and I were in a cabin in the middle of the Wisconsin wilderness.  Given the lack of running water (bathing involves jumping in a lake with soap) and large amounts of dirt, sunblock, and bug spray present in the cabin, however, I felt it prudent to leave the Wedding blanket in the safety of our home.  Which is a shame, because the amount of down time you have in a cabin without electricity or cell phone reception in a week?

I can measure it in feet.  11+ feet, to be exact.  I figured that rope by definition should be durable enough to wash, and if that’s the case then the cabin is a perfect excuse for me to indulge in my latest obsession.  That disk in the center is what I picked up at Old Navy, although now that I’ve worked with it for a while I’m pretty sure I could recreate it from any decently large, pliable, round disk.

Still trying to figure out the patterning, but the experimentation on that has been postponed until after the Wedding Blanket and the cARGHdigan are done.

Monkey Kitty wanted to give you some sense of scale, so I tied him up a bit in the rope.

You can’t see it in the picture, but he was purring hard and kneading the air with his paws the whole time.  Monkey Kitty is truly his mama’s son the way he loves yarn.

In fact, in the time it took me to run down the stairs and back to fetch the camera to take pictures, Money Kitty got very familiar with the yarn – I didn’t catch it on camera, but I came back to find him with the rope in his mouth.  He’s learned that I don’t like that, though, so while I had the camera nearby he resigned himself to dreaming about chewing the yarn mere millimeters from his fangs.

Dream on, Monkey Kitty.  Meanwhile, now that I’m back in civilization I’ve got to get back to that Wedding Blanket.

The Mariners do a Stitch & Pitch event every year, and every year I love it.  The sounds, the sights, the knitters…

Sometimes the home team doesn’t lose, too!

This year, given the pressures I’m under, I’ve decided to do something very risky.

It’s covered in plastic for now, but as soon as I start knitting? This may end in tragedy - The Blanket Thief wants to order BBQ.

The wedding blanket continues.  Just, er…not as quickly as I need it to.

See, when I do some quick calculations, it turns out that I have roughly 754 rows left to knit (not including the border, which I’m purposefully not thinking about in an attempt to hold on to my sanity).  And even if I assume that I’ll be able to knit every day until the wedding (which I won’t) and that I won’t have to spend any time blocking (which I will) and that the border will just magically appear out of the ether (which it won’t)…even if I assume all of that, I still have to knit at least 15 rows every day in order to get this done.  Which doesn’t sound that bad, except that each row is roughly 139 stitches, which means I have to knit 2,085 stitches every day from now until the wedding in September.

Pray for me.

This last weekend, for the first time in my life, I had the overwhelming urge to knit a flap heel.  On every other sock I’ve ever knitted, I’ve done an 
Auto Heel - it was the first heel I ever learned how to do, and it’s the only heel I’ve done since.

And yet, when I got to the point that I was ready to add a heel onto the go-everywhere socks I’m knitting, my first instict was: “I should use this pair of socks to try out a flap heel.”

I think it’s because I’m finding that I actually really don’t like these socks.  Mostly it’s the colors – and what’s driving me nuts, of all things, is the green.  Those who know me will blink a bit when they read that, because green is by far my favorite color, and yet when used in this sock, I hate it. I think it has too much brown mixed in or something.

Poor flap heel – given that I’m predisposed to not liking these socks already, the chances the experience of the heel will convert me away from the Auto Heel are small.

Then again, when you’ve already learned the best way for you to do something, why change?

I should really be working on the Wedding Blanket, but for the last couple days I’ve had a new obsession.
 

That, my friends, is a friendship bracelet maker that I found at Old Navy for a few bucks.  I figured that, since I tend to like fiber arts in general, I might enjoy this.  Plus, it would likely give me a way to add more decorative cords whenever I needed them.

It might be hard to tell from the picture, but the rope it’s making has these little mini flowers on it.  After only a few hours, I have almost four inches of super cute, delicate, flowered rope.

I think I’m in love.  And the Wedding Blanket?

Maybe I can finish it after the wedding?

The Knitting Black Hole is a well understood recognized phenomenon wherein a knitter knits and knits and never seems to make any progress.  Generally related to large swathes of stockinette, the Knitting Black Hole plagues many a knitter, often causing severe emotional distress and consternation.

More rare, however, is the Knitting Shrink Hole.  This phenomenon is categorized by a section of knitting that not only refuses to grow with more knitting, but goes so far as to shrink between measurements.  Often, this shrinking behavior is in strict opposition to any swatches that may have been performed on the pattern before casting on for the actual project.

The Wedding Blanket is a prime example of a Knitting Shrink Hole.  When I swatched the center pattern, I ended up with something that told me that if I did 9 repeats, I would end up with 6 feet exactly.  However, 9 repeats later, I’m not at 6 feet at all.  I’m not even close to six feet.  After 9 repeats (or 500+ rows, or several thousand stitches), where am I?

I’m at 5′2″.  That’s 10 whole freakin’ inches short!  That’s very nearly a foot short!  Where did those inches go?

It’s unclear.

And don’t even get me started on width.  When I started the center section, I was sure it was at least 18 inches.  I measured it constantly, and I was always very, very sure that it was a foot and a half wide.  Dead certain.  I would have staked money on it.

Now that I’ve knit the entire panel?  Not so much.  Now it looks like it’s clocking in at 12 inches maybe, and that’s if I stretch it out a bit.

I’ve never experienced a Knitting Shrink Hole so extreme.  Sure, an inch or two here or there, but 50% shrinkage?  Without getting wet or felted?  What’s going on?

Luckily, I can still console myself with the fact that I haven’t yet blocked it.  Blocking will fix everything, right?  Right?  Hello?  Why are you laughing?

I’m kind of upset that it looks so gorgeous, actually.  If it were hideous, I’d contemplate starting over, but as it is I get lulled into a false sense of security looking at it and I feel like it’ll all come out okay in the end.  I’m not sure how it’ll all come out okay when I’m losing literally feet of knitting, but somehow I’m convinced that it’ll work out.

After all, maybe I was really knitting them a place mat.

I’m super behind on a lot of things lately, not least of which is this blog.  As it turns out, when you decide to do three major home improvement projects in a week, it ends up being three weeks of working on said projects at every spare moment.  Actually, technically I’m still not done, but what’s left is mostly cosmetic and I’ve been putting it off.

Just as I was finishing up the home improvement, though, I had a concert run with my choir which took up all of my spare time for another week.  And since The Blanket Thief proposed in May and we’re planning on getting married in September there’s plenty of stuff to do and worry about in that area as well.  Not to mention, work continues to be extreme.

All of which is a long run up for my apology for not posting as often as I should.  I swear, I’ll try to post more often…in fact, to that end I’ve installed an app on my phone that claims I’ll be able to post from anywhere.  If you’re reading this, apparently it works.

Next post to contain an actual picture of the Wedding Blanket – I’m almost 15% done with the second panel!

So, just over a year ago, I decided to knit the Blanket Thief some slippers.  I’d read about them on the Yarn Harlot’s blog a while ago, and when he mentioned that he didn’t have any slippers I immediately thought, “That’s something knitting can fix!”

Now, mind you, I tend to have the “That’s something knitting can fix!” reaction a lot – it’s my version of “if all you have is a hammer…” – but usually I’m stretching at best.  This time, though, I was right – this was indeed a problem that knitting could fix, and without much ado I found yarn, I found that Fiber Trends pattern, and I went to work.  Easy peasy.

The Blanket Thief has been super happy with them for the past year, except for one tiny little thing.  I had planned to sew on some suede bottoms in order to make them a little less slippery/last a bit longer, and I went so far as to buy said bottoms…

…but I never actually attached said bottoms.  By and large, this was something that everyone was okay with, and things might have in fact stayed this way forever if I hadn’t noticed that the slippers were leaving little pills on the carpet next to the couch where the Blanket Thief liked to sit.  Apparently, I was totally okay with the idea that I might have to knit him another pair someday when they wore away, and I was kind of okay with the idea that he might slip a little on the few tiled surfaces in our house, but the idea of the really messy, to-be-replaced-someday carpet getting pills on it?  Apparently not okay.

I quickly whipped out my cotton thread, and within a couple episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, the slippers had soles.

I’m not convinced I did the best job ever (frankly, I’m sure I could do better if I were to rip them out and try again, now that I’ve had the practice), but the Blanket Thief thinks they’re snazzy and who am I to argue?

Besides, when you get right down to it, they do look pretty snazzy.

Maybe I need a pair…