Becca's Blog

Yarn-conservation action undertaken.

Sigh. On Saturday I got to my mental stopping point on the blue baby blankie, knit a final round, and gleefully started on the border. First I started with the pretty leaf-vein vertical pattern I found in Knitting on the Edge. I quickly realized that knitting 36 stitches for every one bound-off stitch was really inefficient, and the lace holes at the edge of the blanket weren't a good idea for something meant to be sturdy.

So I went down to a 9-stitch border of seed and garter stitch, then about 40 stitches in, I started picking up a live stitch on both the right and wrong sides. It took a bit of yarn wrapping to knit the stitches together on the wrong side, but actually I liked the way the edge was laying with a stitch picked up every row. It had a firmer, flatter edge.

But I began to worry about running out of yarn--by the time I got one wedge of the hexagon bound off I was really nervous. Rather than knitting until the skein ran out and hoping it would go halfway around, I had the brains to weigh the yarn remaining in the skein. A bit more than half a skein left, meaning something like half a skein consumed by one-sixth of the blanket. No real hope of finding this same dyelot again (I think this yarn is at least two years old).

So I spent a good bit of last night ripping out the border, and I'm unknitting that last round, stitch by stitch. It's really taken the wind out of my sails, when I was so excited about being in the home stretch. I'll probably see if I can finish ripping tonight, but if not, I'll set it aside for a few days and try to finish something else. While I'm at it, I might count stitches so I can know exactly what's ahead of me--even if that's not the most motivational thing to do.

I'm going to have a lot of unscheduled time and waiting time this weekend in San Diego while Jane walks, so I bet I can finish it then.

Headed in the wrong direction...

I watched a chunk of the opening ceremonies last night, before Monk came on, and slowly, carefully ripped back to the first ugly mistake in the shawl and got the stitches back on a needle. This project has been languishing for so long that I didn't even regret the ripping, but that was a *lot* of knitting.  Let that be a lesson to me not to say "it won't show in the finished product" again.

Practice makes putrid.

Last night I knitted the heel flap and turned the heel on my practice sock. I'm using the Simple Sock pattern from Socks Soar on Two Circular Needles. And I've got to say--I'm not enamored of the two circulars technique yet. It could be because I'm using bamboo needles with somewhat sticky, splitty yarn, or it could be that psychologically, this doesn't feel like circular knitting, which bothers me. And on top of that, the heel stitch is ugly, and the turned heel looks ugly and stiff and like it won't fit right.

I've been blindly following the instructions without a wholistic sense of why I'm doing this, which I'm also bothered by, and now I'm supposed to make the gusset, and the instructions aren't making sense at all. I'm going to have to consult a couple of other sock patterns and hope they let me understand what the next step is supposed to be. I'm bugged by Cat Bordhi's cutesy-poo writing style that's obscuring what I need to know--this is a learning pattern and she's a teacher? Sheesh.

OK, rant over. I'll work through it, finish this ugly thing (I really like this yarn despite the complaints), then move on to a nicer sock pattern.

I'm also crabby because I took a slew of pictures of my yarn stash yesterday, only to blow them away in the process of importing. So 40 minutes' worth of shooting down the drain. And I've been trying in vain to create some Web banners, for this site and the static HTML site I've been procrastinating on for years.