G. Knerd

In my last post, I mentioned that I was just about to start blocking the border for Wedding Blanket the First.  This was a somewhat momentous occasion, as it’s been months since I finished knitting said border, and at no time did I actually measure the in-progress or finished border against the blanket it was intended for.

Can you see where this is going?

It all started with a pile of border – when I was knitting it, it seemed like miles, but in retrospect it was really only several yards long.

The border got the customary dunking in water, was squeezed out, and then I laid it out in a rough rectangle on the floor.

This was when I started to get nervous.  This seemed…large.  In fact, this seemed like the size I had wanted the blanket to be, although I was pretty sure that the blanket was not, in fact, this large.

Laying out the blanket only confirmed my fears.  Somewhere, something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

The width is about right, but the length?  Not so much.  No amount of fudging is going to bring that back into alignment, either, unless I want to make the long-edge border ruffled.

So there’s going to be some knitting surgery in the near future.  I need to extract almost a foot from both long edges.

After that, the slog to attach said border will commence.

Just between you and me, I don’t think I’m going to get this done within a year of the wedding.  Maybe we should make the new deadline 18 months?

The Blanket Thief complains that I have a messed up view of karma because I basically think it works like a bank – that you  can take withdrawals in the form of good things happening to you, that you make deposits by both living through shitty things and doing good to others.  I think he thinks I’m taking the system too literally.

I’ve always had a problem with being too literal.  He knew that when he married me.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago a woman in my choir sent out a call to all the ‘knitters’ for any spare yarn or supplies they might have.  She works with at-risk youth, and apparently one of her new charges is living on about $30/month.  She’s also a knitter.

Can you imagine trying to sustain a yarn habit on just $30/month?  And that’s assuming you don’t have to pay for anything else, which is certainly not the situation this young lady is in.

Now, I have more knitting paraphernalia and stash than is really healthy for me to own, so I jumped at the idea that I could both de-stash and help out someone less fortunate.  I dug into the supplies first:

Even though I haven’t used straight knitting kneedles in who-knows-how-long, I have a relatively impressive collection of them.  So impressive, in fact, that I could put together a complete set from 0 to 11 for this young lady and still have multiple sets of most of the sizes still in my possession.  Not quite the same story with DPNs, but close.

Then I broke into the stash.  I tried to give her a range of weights and fibers – any young knitter should have some options to play with.  I didn’t give her anything too expensive (I’m not that generous), but there was some brand names like Lamb’s Pride and Cascade 220 along with some cheaper yarn I’m not likely to ever use.

All in all, it ended up being about 2 cubic feet of yarn and supplies.  I hope, wherever this girl is, that it’s bringing her some joy.

And hey, if it adds up to a little more positive karmic balance for me, I’m not going to say no.

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 may have bragged last night that I had picked a project for the Knitting Olympics which was, if not easy, at least possibly not hard enough to qualify for Olympic status.  Nothing in the pattern was particularly hard (except, maybe, understanding it…), the large gauge meant that there weren’t too many stitches, and it centered around a simple lace pattern that I could easily memorize.  I haven’t even been knitting on the bus or at work at all, and yet I knit the last stitch last night.

I should have known better.

This is what everything looked like when I was all ready to start blocking:

And since I like to get things really wet when I block them, everything went straight into the sink for a soak.  I was feeling so cocky about getting finished on time that I even cleaned the sink first instead of just getting a mixing bowl.

Blocking has always been one of my most favorite parts of knitting, at least whenever there’s lace involved.  You’re basically taking something wrinkled and blotchy and in no way resembling something amazing, and with a little water and a few pins you’re turning into a magical weightless sheet of fabric – I don’t care how many times you do it, it’s always going to be awesome.  I started with blocking out the top – having the lace attached to the body and double layered made the process somewhat ridiculous – if I were to do it again, I think I’d make the lace around the neck separately and graft it on after blocking.

Once I had that straight (or as good as it was going to get), I moved on to the right sleeve with its twelve beautiful points.  This is another place where, if I were to do the pattern again, I’d probably do the grafting post blocking instead of before so I didn’t have to double the fabric at all and I could make it straighter overall.

I wanted to be sure to have the same size for the left sleeve, so I tried to fold the right side in half to get six pairs of points like I had with the right sleeve.

That didn’t work out so well.  It’s hard to tell with this picture, but the farthest point to the left doesn’t actually have a pair.  Somehow, I managed to knit a sleeve with eleven points.  It took counting both sets of sleeve points about seven times each before I accepted it – the left sleeve did not in any way match the right.

Normally, this discovery wouldn’t be too bad – I’d just unpick the grafted row, unravel the bind-off edge, knit another repeat of the pattern, and do it all over again.  Given that it’s only ten rows, that shouldn’t take me more than the evening to fix.  The problem?

It’s wet.

So now, instead of waiting for my pieces to dry so I can seam them together, I’m waiting for my sleeve to dry so I can unravel it, knit more onto it, graft it together again (even though I’d do it differently if I were doing the whole pattern again, I think I should do both sleeves for this time the same – even if it’s wrong), weave in the ends again, string up the sides for blocking again, get it wet again, and then finally get to the blocking it and waiting for it to dry part.  I’ve put an extra day into the process, at least.

If there were anything I could do about it, I wouldn’t be writing this post.  If I owned a hairdryer, I’d be sitting next to an outlet gently forcing the yarn dry.

Luckily for you, my hairdryer died a couple months ago after more than a decade of being mostly ignored in the cupboard.  At the time, I remember thinking, “You know, the only reason I can think of to get a new one would be if I had a knitting project I wanted to dry faster…and even then, I can always just wait for the yarn to dry naturally.”

I hate it when the Knitting Fates take perfectly reasonable and sound arguments and use them against you.

At least everything except the sleeve is properly blocked and gorgeous.  My favorite is how the hip band just seems to go on forever.

After all, it’s almost seven feet long.  In knitting, that’s like miles!

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.

For Thanksgiving weekend, we (the Blanket Thief and I) went up to visit my parents.  I packed at the last minute (er…like always), which meant that I had to be a bit quick about which knitting projects to bring.  Of course, there were the in-progress-go-anywhere socks that were already in my purse, but then I couldn’t think of what else to bring.

At some point, I should do a round up of my WIP – that would be a good reminder for me to actually finish some of them.  But that’s a different post (or several) for a different day.

The most likely candidate for me to bring that weekend was the cARGHdigan, but I didn’t really want to package all of that up for the trip.  I could have taken any one of the dozens of sock yarns I have, but…er…that would have required me to pick one, and that didn’t sound like a quick idea at the time.

When we were already at least twenty minutes late, I decided to not decide, which meant that all I ended up taking was the in-progress socks and a shawl I wanted to block.  At the time, I kind of patted myself on the back, thinking that I had made it out of the trap that most knitters fall into when they take an extra bag for the weekend to hold all of their projects/yarn (none of which they have time to touch).  I was more evolved.  I was realistic – it wasn’t like I was going to actually finish those socks.

They have a word for that feeling I was having – they call it “hubris”, and the Knitting Fates find it particularly fun to punish.

Apparently, I knit socks faster than I thought I did – I started the weekend at the red line, was at the orange line by the end of Thursday, and I was done with the pair before Friday night, with no other projects, no new yarn, nothing else to keep my hands busy for the next 48 hours.

I don’t think I’ll ever travel without an extra suitcase again.