G. Knerd

…but traction really ain’t one of them.

Ouch.

This weekend, I was up at my parents’ house where they have hardwood just about everywhere.  I was also being a bit silly and stole The Blanket Theif’s bandana and was running around the house with it.  I was also wearing these socks:

While running, I took a sharp turn – or, rather, I tried to take a sharp turn, but while my body faced the right direction my momentum couldn’t be counteracted by the socks-on-hardwood combo, and my feet slipped out from under me so quickly that they actually hit the underside of the bottom shelf of the bookcase next to me and I swear I was off the ground for a full half second.

Then, of course, gravity took over and I slammed back into the ground, elbow first.  Owww…

Still, the thing that continues to hurt the worst is the bruise on the side of my foot.  I wish I had a video of the situation so I could analyze the physics…to get that kind of upward force on my foot, the pivoting around center of mass must have been awesome.

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.

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.

I have a habit of persevering even when I know a knitting project isn’t working.  Over the years, I’ve tried to break the habit, but…every now and then, something slips past me, and by the time I realize I should quit I’m already committed.

So…a couple months ago, I got it into my head that I would recreate these socks:

(Sorry for the stray cat hair in the picture – I blame Monkey Kitty)

And a better texture shot:

When I made these a couple years ago, I was so excited – I thought the pattern was beautiful, the yarn (Trekking XXL in some lost colorway) was exquisite, and I was ready to write it up as a pattern for Knitty.

Then, a month later, Knitty came out, and it had this pattern in it.  I was crushed.  They weren’t the same as my socks, but they were close enough that it wouldn’t make sense for the Knitty editors to take my pattern after publishing that one.  I gave up on the pattern idea and went back to knitting random other sock patterns.

But when I found myself between socks a couple months ago, the idea came back that I could write up the pattern, and even if Knitty wouldn’t take it, maybe someone else would.  Or maybe I’d just post it on Ravelry myself.

So…I cast on with the ball of yarn I had with me (I was visiting the Blanket Thief’s family at the time), and got this far:

It…wasn’t exactly working.  The stripes in the yarn were just too discrete, and they were hiding the pattern I actually wanted to display.  Plus, I’d used a 2×2 rib for the cuff instead of a 1×1 (with the k sts twisted), so it was off to the frog pond for that attempt.

The next attempt was started at home, so I had access to all of my sock yarn.  Why I chose this particular yarn, I’m not sure – I think it had something to do with the fact that the color changes were so quick (around 5 inches on average), so I thought it would come out in a nice mottled look.

Yeah, sometimes I think I’m on crack too.

I somehow managed to not take a picture of the yarn before knitting, so I’ll just show you the final project.

Yarn: Lana Grossa Meilenweit Fun in the 139 colorway, Pattern: My own Chinese lanterns adaptation

Yeah.  Totally didn’t work right.  The colors are way, way, way too busy for this pattern, way too complicated, way too bright.  You really can’t see the pattern at all, actually.  I think I would have been better off going with the first yarn instead, despite the striping.

Maybe next time I’ll figure it out before I’m well into the second sock.  I would have been willing to frog it and started over with different yarn if I hadn’t already finished the first one…

Last night, I found myself facing a new week without a single pair of socks on the needles.  Of course, I couldn’t let that happen, so I immediately brought out my sock yarn stash (it has its own box) and my trusty A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara Walker, and started the process.

First, I picked out the possible contenders for the pair of socks I had in my mind:

Then I narrowed it down further to the two I liked best at the time:

And then I decided that since I’ve already proven that I like socks made out of Tofutsies (also, since when does Amazon* carry yarn?), I didn’t want to try mixing a brand-new, experimental pattern with a yarn I’ve never tried, and the Tofutsies won:

(Also?  That’s some pretty sweet end-finding on that skein there.  See that?  I think it’s less than 6 feet/2 meters.)

Of course, after swatching the Frost Flowers pattern for a full repeat, all I knew was that Frost Flowers + socks was not going to happen, at least not this time:

It’s pretty, sure, but it’s alternately either not stretchy enough or way too stretchy – not sure how it manages to pull that off, but that’s how it is.

With only minutes before bedtime, and still no viable socks on the needles, I decided to go for a more simple, reliable yarn/pattern combo:

Self-patterning sock yarn (Deborah Norville Sock Yarn in the Thyme colorway, to be precise).  Pattern will be my own generic 72-stitch 2×2 rib sock (fits almost any width foot, although these – like almost all the socks I knit – are for me).

With only seconds left in the evening, I found an identical point in the skeins and cast on a couple rows.  In my haste, however, I may have overlooked several other identical points – this is the yarn I wound off before starting, from each of the skeins:

Notice any similarities?  Like maybe how I totally could have started right after the green instead of winding all the way through the speckled parts and the orange parts?

I’d say maybe I’d learned for next time, but we all know that’s not true – I bet I totally do the same thing next time too.

*I totally recommend buying your yarn/supplies from your Local Yarn Shop so you can support your local economy, but since I can’t link to every LYS near you (well, the JavaScript involved would not be fun to write…), Amazon seemed like a decent substitute.

(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.

Eventually, I think people will probably wonder: What does “G. Knerd” mean, anyway?  I could let it be a mystery, but I don’t think it’s a very good one, and I’d rather save those mystery credits for stuff that’s actually worth the suspense.

G. Knerd is short for Gnittink Knerd.  “Gnittink” is really just “Knitting” spelled backwards.  At the time I came up with the name, I was unreasonably tickled by the idea that the word “Knitting” would be a palindrome if you just left off the first and last letters.  We’ll not speak of how much time I spent giggling as I tried to explain it to my friends – there’s good evidence that maybe I shouldn’t try to name things, especially late at night.

So that explains the “G.” part, but the “Knerd”?  Well, at the same time I was giggling about the “Knitting” becoming “Gnittink” thing, I also started thinking about how “Knitting” starts with a ‘K’, but it’s a silent ‘K’…and how often do you see a silent ‘K’, anyway?  And then I thought about how I was really a nerd (no, really, have been for a very long time, and proud of it), and I thought to myself, “Well, wouldn’t it be neat if I added a silent ‘K’ to “nerd” as well?  It wouldn’t change the pronunciation, but it would make it kind of awesome.”  (Yes, I know, I shouldn’t be put in charge of naming things.)

And thus was “G. Knerd” created.  I’ve used the persona a couple times here or there, I’m on Ravelry with it (although I don’t spend much time there), I’ve tried experimenting with blogging with it before (with minimal success, mostly due to lack of time and  proper camera equipment), but I’ve never really commited.

Until now.  I’m going to do this blogging thing for real this time.

The Yarn Goes Marching Four by Four, Hurrah....