G. Knerd

In the past week, I’ve done exactly zero knitting.

I know.  I’m shocked too.  I didn’t know it was possible for me to live without knitting for so long.  I don’t even have a good explanation for it, either – I wasn’t injured, I wasn’t trapped anywhere without yarn, and even though yesterday was Erica’s wedding (which was lovely), I really wasn’t even that busy this week either.  (If you’re thinking of getting married, by the way, I really think you should talk to her about the magic she pulled together.  The whole month before her wedding, she turned down any and all offers to help with, “Oh, no, don’t worry about it, it’s totally under control.”  And she wasn’t lying at all.)

Frankly, I think I must be ill.

I didn’t even touch the Wedding Blanket, even though I’m finally at the last (infinite) step of sewing on the border.

Nor did I knit anything on the Wedding Blanket II, despite the wedding this weekend being near perfect motivation.

If I’d wanted variety, I could have worked a bit on the Blanket Thief‘s cARGHdigan, which has been sitting patiently in a box next to the couch for months while I was distracted on Wedding Blankets I and II.  (Note to self: next time, don’t promise husband a sweater until after said sweater is done.  Also, don’t encourage said husband to pick thin yarn for said sweater.)

And, really, there were plenty of times when I was out and about that I could have been knitting, and just…wasn’t.  I’ve had this pair of socks in my purse for months as well, but I don’t think I’ve knit on them in weeks, easily.

I must be ill.  There’s no other possible explanation.

The thing about making a sweater up from scratch, as I’m doing with the cARGHdigan project, is that there’s no one to blame but yourself when things go wrong.

For example, when (finally) started on the sleeves, I measured The Blanket Thief‘s wrists.  He wanted them pretty tight, so I added an inch, looked up the gauge I’d calculated earlier, figured out how many stitches to cast on, started knitting like a fiend.  When the cuff was done, I measured his biceps, the length of his arm, did a few more calculations, and kept knitting, increasing as I went.

The whole time, I kept looking at it thinking, “Something doesn’t look right.  It seems a little bit small, right?  It’s not quite right.”  And yet, I soldiered on, not one to let a little adversity sway me from completing a project.

On the other hand, I also didn’t want to let stubbornness force me to finish two entire sleeves before admitting that they weren’t coming out right – and something about having to increase on every other row certainly seemed very wrong.  After about 8 inches of knitting, I finally put it around The Blanket Thief’s arm and asked, “Sweetie, what do you think?”

He grimaced.  “It’s a little tight.”

Crap.  At least I can always trust him to be honest.

As for the sleeves?  I’m going to make them walk the plank, then I’m starting over.  At least I was only halfway up the forearms before I figured it out – that’s progress, right?

I’ve apparently decided that I’m supposed to churn through all of my Works In Progress (yes, there are enough of them to have formed a committee with capital letters) before starting anything new.  I suspect this is not in small part related to the fact that I can’t buy new yarn anymore.

Speaking of not buying new yarn, for some reason I think it’s a good idea for me to go with some friends to a yarn store sale tomorrow.  I even think it’s possible that I won’t buy gobs of yarn while I do.

Yeah, I think I’m crazy too.  Not much I can do about it now except hope the damage will not be too great.

In the meantime, I’ve made some progress on the cARGHdigan!  The body is done (well, except for all the finishing…)!

You can sort of see what I was going for with the whole idea of sloping the back and having the sides come over the shoulder to meet it here…except, you know, how the sides both tilt to the right, when in reality they’re supposed to be perfectly flat.  Apparently, I can’t block to save my life.  I straightened them out after taking this picture, but I guess I forgot to take a picture of proof that I wasn’t a moron.

As soon as it was dry again, I seamed up the shoulders and demanded that the Blanket Thief try it on.  I figured I was already being a bit pushy, so I didn’t also demand that he either put on a different shirt or strip entirely – even I know there are limits, but that means it’s hard to tell where the sweater ends due to the black-on-black nature of the setup.

It seems just a bit small in the body, but that’s the way he wants it (and who am I to argue with less knitting?).  The armholes fit fine and rest exactly where they’re supposed to be, so that’s one potential crisis averted.

Now, it’s on to the sleeves!  At some point, I think I’ll even stop being excited about them for long enough to actually figure out how big they need to be and cast them on!

Every now and then, I’ve been having the Blanket Thief “try on” the cARGHdigan to see if the arm holes are big enough.  Generally, this process looks something like this:

(I had a better picture, but the Blanket Thief forbid me from posting it.  If he ever pisses me off, though…)

Given that the needle I’m using isn’t exactly long enough to go all the way around his shoulders, “trying on the cARGHdigan” translates into “Honey, stand still while I wrap this knitting around your arm.  What do you think?  Is it cutting off circulation?  Can you still feel your fingers?”

A few days ago, however, we made the transition from “not even close” to “really, actually almost there.”

Now, I have this idea for how I want the shoulders to work, and it involves using short rows to build up the knitting directly below the neck such that the back angles down from the neck to the arm holes, and then knit the front sides a bit longer than the back so that the seam at the shoulders actually falls towards the back and follows the line of the body.  It’s something I’ve noticed in store bought sweaters, but not so much on hand-knitted ones (so, of course, I had to try the way no one else uses…).

I did some quick calculations for how many stitches I wanted in the neck vs. each side, decided to do 8 rows, skipping an extra 10 or 11 stitches at each turn, which would ultimately give me 42 shoulder stitches on each side and 30 stitches at the neck.  Thus committed, I started merrily knitting away until I reached this point:

Each bit of red indicates somewhere that I’ve ended a short row, so at this point I’m about six rows into this shaping.  It was at this point that I thought to myself, “You know, I probably want to have the same number of stitches on the sides of the back as I do on the sides of the front…”

It amazes me how oblivious I am to the obvious sometimes…

Practically holding my breath, I dropped everything to count how many stitches were on the needles, feverishly hoping that the number was somewhere between 39-45, because I was pretty sure I could make any of those numbers eventually work.  Imagine my surprise when I came up with exactly 42 stitches.

I didn’t believe it either.

Four recounts of both sides later, though, it was clear that somehow the Knitting Fates had allowed me to pick the exact right number on the back to correspond to what I’d already done on the front.  It was an amazing, amazing moment, made even better when I realized that 42 was, in fact, the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

I’ve been super swamped lately with various work and life things, so instead of posting about what I”m doing now, I’m going to delve a bit into the past.  Why I think that blogging about a past project instead of a current one will have any affect on my general stress level I have no idea, but it’s not a good idea to argue with me right now.

A few years ago, I dated this guy.  To say the relationship was unusual would be, er, understating it.  I’m not going to go into all the details, but he’s the reason that I once knitted Ex-Cursed Ex-Ex-Ex-Boyfriend Socks.

A couple days ago, completely out of the blue, I got a text from this guy, and it reminded me about the first thing I ever knit for him.

Yes, it’s a sweater.  And yes, as soon as I finished it, we broke up.  This wasn’t the first time the Boyfriend Sweater Curse had bitten me, and it wasn’t the last time either, but…there’s a part of me that likes to think that if you’re meant to be with someone, a curse made of yarn and love and warmth can’t possibly break you up.  Or, to put it another way, the Boyfriend Sweater Curse is a way for the Knitting Fates to keep you away from people you shouldn’t end up with.

Or maybe I’m justifying, because I can’t seem to learn my lesson…

But…look!  Flames!

The pattern itself was from one of the Stitch & Bitch books (can’t remember which one, and too rushed to find a link unfortunately – if it really matters let me know and I’ll dig it up for you later) and the sweater was knit in Lion Brand Wool Ease.  Not the best yarn ever, but this was when I was still getting over acrylic.  On the other hand, it looks pretty impressive, what with the intarsia and double-knitting.

Ultimately, it just really wasn’t meant to be when it came to the relationship between me and Flaming Sweater Man, and the fact that the Boyfriend Sweater Curse worked against us proved it.

Some of you might wonder, then, if I feel comfortable with the fact that I’m now knitting a sweater for the man I’m dating (aka The Blanket Thief).  But I’m not worried – I think the Knitting Fates agree with me in thinking that it’s for keeps between me and the Blanket Thief.

I also think I can be forgiven for reveling a bit in the fact that the cARGHdigan is a much more difficult and awesome sweater than the flaming sleeves sweater…right?

I’ve been frantically trying to get my Knitting Olympics project finished, so I haven’t had time for a real post (and unfortunately, I only seemed to plan for one week’s worth of Knitting Olympics ahead of time…).  For now, hopefully this will tide you over:

That’s the current state of the cARGHdigan for the Blanket Thief – right at the point where I have to figure out what I’m going to do about the sleeves.  I’ve always done raglan or drop sleeves when making my own sweater patterns (mostly because they require so little calculations or precision), but for this one the Blanket Thief was adamant that the sleeve cap be set in.  He’s being pretty understanding about me randomly picking up and putting down his [at this point long overdue] Christmas present, I figure the least I can do is make it the way he wants it.

Of course, I’m not even thinking about it until after the Knitting Olympics are over.  Speaking of which…

I’m kind of shocked to be in this position, actually.  I was really, really sure this was going to go differently.  I mean, it always does, right?

Last night, as I was putting the cARGHdigan away for the night, I suddenly had a thought.  A very disturbing, very unsettling thought.  A thought that threatened to cause me to unravel all manner of knitting – we’re talking serious inches here.

What I was thinking was, “Wait a minute, I don’t think this is what the picture that the Blanket Thief gave me looked like…”

See, the Blanket Thief sketched out exactly what he wanted me to knit him, and he was pretty adamant that he wanted it to look exactly like the picture.  The picture which, I suddenly realized, I hadn’t looked at in a couple weeks – long since before I worked out how big the diamonds would be, never mind since before I started actually knitting them.

I think my fingers were actually shaking when I pulled out the sketch.

Now, let’s compare that with what I’ve spent the past few weeks working on:

Notice anything wrong with these pictures?  What if I put them side-by-side?

Now do you see it?  The way that the drawing has a red diamond at the bottom, while the knitting…doesn’t?

Yeah, I was pretty pissed when I realized that.  I’ve been churning away at this one, knitting to the point that my fingers kind of ache (which, for me, is a heck of a lot of knitting).  And because this is all stockinette, half of this is purling.  Half!  If ever there were a physical representation of love and devotion, this is it.

It took me a few minutes to work myself up to accepting that I was going to have to frog it back.  I spent most of that time trying to determine if there were some more clever way I could do things.  I came up with some pretty good ideas, actually.

Option 1) Duplicate stitch the bottom red diamonds. The problem here would be the extra bulk for those diamonds, plus the issue of some of the base black yarn showing through the red.  Still, not completely unacceptable, and – considering how much time this would save versus the other knitting surgery options – a definite contender.

Option 2) Unravel just the black yarn and replace it with red. This would work for the upper half of the diamond, but the lower half isn’t just one piece of yarn back and forth – or, well, it is, but that same piece of yarn goes all the way to both sides of the fabric.  To get the same effect for the bottom of the diamond, I’d have to do something like cut through a stitch on every row that I wanted to replace and then tie down and weave in all the ends somehow.  The first part of the plan (the upper half of the diamond) has a lot of merit, but the ridiculousness of the bottom half would mean I’d likely find another method for at least that part if not the whole thing.

Option 3) Snip a thread and unravel the row right at where the problem stops (just below the tip of the red diamond, as everything above that is in pattern), put the stitches from the top on a holder while unraveling the bottom to where the problem starts (the bottom of the blue diamond), knit up in pattern, and then Kitchener stitch the two pieces together. This one is by far the hardest to put into words, but the most likely to have lasting success.  When I finished with it, there would be two (or maybe 10, depending on how you looked at it) extra yarn ends to tie down and weave in, but by and large this would likely be the most invisible knitting surgery.  For the sake of saving time, I might combine the first half of option 2 with this one, but I think option 3 is likely the “right” fix.

I’m sure there are other options for the fix, but those are the ones I came up with at the moment.  Luckily (and I regularly thank whatever managed to bring the Blanket Thief into my life for situations just like this) the Blanket Thief came downstairs and asked me what I was up to.

“Trying to figure out how to unravel the least amount possible,” I told him, staring intently at the cARGHdigan.

“Er…why, exactly, would you unravel any of it?” he asked, alarmed.

“Because I screwed up.”  When he looked confused, I explained, and when he still didn’t say anything right away, I whipped out the original sketch and put it next to the knitting, so he could see just how much I’d messed up.

He spent a minute looking back and forth between the two, before he announced, “I don’t want you to unravel it.  I like it better this way.  It’s pointier.”

I did my best to make sure that he was serious, that he wasn’t trying to just protect my feelings, but he was adamant that he wanted a design change – luckily, exactly the design change I’d accidentally made.  Despite my hounding and his unwavering insistence to keep it this way, there’s still a chance that he would rather have the red diamonds on the ends, but…at this point, I don’t think I can go through that again.  We’re committed.  We’re having blue diamonds on the top and bottom.  We’re going for pointier.

I mean, I’ve knit this much:

It’s a testament to how much I love him that I was even willing to consider frogging it, but now that the decision has been made, we’re sticking to it.  It’s not every day that the Knitting Fates let you dodge a bullet like this – you can’t question it too hard when it happens.

After all, the Knitting Fates don’t like being ignored.  I don’t want to think about what they’d do to me if I didn’t listen to them telling me to keep going.

Remember how excited I was when I got to the first blue stitches?  Like, perhaps unreasonably excited?

Yeah, that’s got nothing on what’s going on now.  I got to the red stitches.  Red, dudes.

I started getting excited as I started nearing the point where there was only one black stitch in the triangles between the blues:

I took the opportunity of having only 7 strands of yarn instead of 9 to untangle the mess attached to the back of the fabric.  It was getting, er…a little scary:

I straightened everything out and finally started to really, really fun part.  I knit the black stitches on the edge, the blue stitches in the first diamond, the first red stitch, the blue stitches in the second diamond, and started across the black stitches in the back of the cARGHdigan.

I was about halfway through the back when something seemed a little, um, wrong.

Can you see it in this picture?

How about in this picture?

What if I bring them both together?  And, er, add some helpful directions?

Yep, the red yarn escaped from its one stitch while I wasn’t paying attention.  I’ve been using this method where I don’t tie down the yarn ends until the end, which lets me have more control over how the knots affect the fabric and how the ends get woven in.  The downside to this method, though, is that when you’re only using the yarn with one stitch, you have to be really careful for the first row.

By the time I figured all of this out, I was already more than a hundred stitches past that point, and I really didn’t want to tink all those stitches so I could fix it.  Which lead to what I think of as the “duct tape fix” of knitting:

That’s right, I just slipped the red yarn through the loose stitch, tied a loose knot, and kept knitting.  When I got to it on the next row, I slipped the red yarn under the blue yarn (like it was supposed to be before it unraveled), put it back through the original black stitch, slipped that loop onto the needle, and knit it like I normally would.

Red diamonds, here we go!

It’s here!  I’m past the stockinette-only section of the cARGHdigan, and I’m ready to start the argyle part!

This is how much knitting there was to get to this point (technically, I could have – or according to the Blanket Thief, should have – started about two inches ago, but I contend it’ll look better with a thicker solid black border at the bottom):

I’d already wound on the bobbins I would need for all the diamonds – that was one of the more fun parts, and I was amazed with how much yarn would fit on one of those things.  It’ll be interesting seeing how many diamonds I can get out of them before I have to refill them.  I’m going to guess 2.5.

That pic is more accurate on the color, but this one is a better “action” shot – at least, as much of an action shot as can reasonably be expected from yarn…

I was all ready to start knitting, I’d even verified that I had one bobbin for every diamond column:

In fact, it wasn’t until I started knitting the row itself that I realized that I was missing something – the black triangles between the diamonds! You know, because I was going to do two blue diamonds, then a red diamond between them, and so forth.

Actually, since I don’t think I’ve ever posted an overall picture of what I’m planning to do, I suppose it’s not fair of me to expect you to know about what the design is supposed to be.  Just trust me, I was missing two black bobbins.

Luckily, the bobbin package I bought had 8 bobbins, so the problem was quickly remedied:

And, after much ado,  I finally got to the fun part.  Now, instead of plain stockinette in black, only black, and nothing but black, I get to knit plain stockinette in black, blue, black, blue, black, blue, black, blue, and black.  And, soon, it’ll be black, blue, red, blue, black, blue, red, blue, and black.  For several dozen rows.

Oh, boy.  I can’t wait for the tangles I’m going to get messing around with 9 strands of yarn.

But, you know, it’ll all be worth it.  Because, dudes…

…it’s not just plain black anymore.  See that?  That is blue in that field of black.  Blue, I tell you.

(Monkey Kitty* is making typing very difficult right now by resting his head on the spacebar.  I’ll try to pull it off anyway, but it might be touch and go for a while…I blame any typos on him.)

I live with a very sneaky, wonderful man, who (since I’m not using real names here) we’re going to call the Blanket Thief.  One night a couple months ago, I was wondering what kind of socks I wanted to cast on for next and figured I’d give Arrgyles a try.

Swatching proved only that I wasn’t going to like the resulting socks, as they somehow were going to end up too big for me (somehow, because the pattern is 70 sts around and I normally like 75-85 sts for my socks – then again, I also tend to like complicated stitch patterns that eat up width…).  Realizing that the Blanket Thief has much bigger feet and ankles than me, I asked if he might want a pair of Arrgyles.

“Well, sure.  I’d love a pair of pirate socks.”  (I may have explained what Arrgyles were before we had this conversation – otherwise, his response would have been more like, “Uh, what?”)

“Even though you told me when we started dating that I should never knit you socks because you wouldn’t appreciate them?”  (I may or may not have a habit of setting the Blanket Thief up.)

He gave me an innocent look.  “Did I say that?”  I nod.  “Well, yeah, I guess I wouldn’t appreciate socks as much as I would, say, a sweater.  Actually, you know what would be really awesome?”  He got a gleam in his eye.  “Could you do that skull and crossbones thing on a sweater?”

“Of course!” I cried, thinking to myself “I can knit practically anything, and he wants to know if I can knit one stinking sweater with a skull and crossbones on it?!”

At least I had enough wherewithal to make sure he understood it was going to be his Christmas present…

So…all of that is just a setup for the cARGHdigan.  Here’s my progress so far:

The yarn is actually black, but the flash on my camera made it more of a gray/slate color.

I’m always surprised by how long the end of a skein lasts – when there was this much left, I was sure it wouldn’t last to the end of the row:

Then, when I finished that row and had this much left, I was sure I’d have to replace it before I got to the end:

But at the end of the row, when I had this much left, then I was sure it wouldn’t make it to the end of the row:

And dudes – I was totally right.  One skein, down.  Probably fifty-bazillion to go.

I can’t wait for the Arrgyle part to begin to relieve some of the monotony of the stockinette.  What was I thinking, agreeing to a whole sweater?

*We live with two cats: Monkey Kitty and Bear Kitty (not their real names, of course – I think blogs are more fun with nicknames).  I’ll do a post or two later to explain where Monkey Kitty and Bear Kitty got their names.