G. Knerd

I don’t spend much time talking about Bear Kitty, but he’s really a very impressive cat.  For one thing, on one body he manages to fit enough fur to cover 6 normal cats – his coat is almost as thick as a sea otter’s (and nearly as waterproof).  This means he tends to shed…a lot.

In an attempt to combat this problem, I decided to try getting a FURminator.  This is one of the most amazing grooming tools I’ve ever seen – every time I brush Bear Kitty with it, I get a literal pile of fur.  Just one stroke of the brush (even after a full brushing just a couple days ago) gets an impressive amount of hair:

For a normal person, their reaction to a big pile of used cat hair would be “Ewww, gross.”

For a fiber-obsessed person, however, the reaction might be the same as mine, which was, “Hrm, that looks an awful lot like a free source of fiber….”

So, for the last couple months, I’ve been collecting the hair I brush off in a bag with the intention of spinning it into some kind of yarn.  What I’m going to do with the yarn once I have it is unclear at best, but I seem to think this is a good idea – I’ve started spinning it:

But then I look at the big pile o’ fur I’ve saved up, and I think that maybe – just maybe – this is all kind of gross and I really shouldn’t be doing this:

I might have to give this pursuit up – it only sounds sane if I don’t tell anyone about it.

Er…

….

…here, look at this cute picture of Bear Kitty instead of thinking about the dirty secret I’ve just revealed to you:

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.

One of the top projects I’m working on right now is a blanket for my best friend’s wedding.  Being me, I decided I was going to design a brand new pattern for this, bought the yarn before I’d figured out what I was going to do, and then once I’d picked out the stitch patterns I liked and figured out what order I wanted them to be in, I cast on and started knitting.

I was about this far when I realized I’d made a mistake already:

My plan was to have a row of eyelets at the beginning of one of the patterns.  You’ll notice, there are no holes in this knitting.

There proceeded about a minute of internal monologue berating myself for not charting out the pattern, especially considering that I do intend to write this up as an official pattern someday.  The only excuse I have to explain it is that I wanted to get knitting right away. We’ll not examine the fact that I probably lost as much time fixing this mistake as I would have charting the pattern (note: I’ve apparently not learned my lesson, as the pattern remains uncharted at this time).

After the mental tongue-lashing, I went to work unraveling the few rows I had.  I decided that it would be good enough to unravel just the section that was messed up, and although the process would be fussier I would save more time not needing to re-cast on and re-knit everything else.

I always think knitting mid-surgery looks really fascinating.  I wonder if I could make a career around just doing knitting surgery.  Is there even such a thing as a knitting surgeon?  And couldn’t you imagine knitting surgeon specialties, like Cable Surgeon or Lace Surgeon?

Maybe I’ve been watching too much Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice…

But, anyway, after more time than I wanted to spend on it, I was back where I should have been all along.

Here’s hoping the rest of it stays on chart (assuming I ever write up the chart, of course).

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’ve heard that the Amish have a tradition in the amazing quilts they make, that there’s always at least one small mistake in those intricate pieced compositions, because only God can be perfect or make perfect things.  Now, given that they’re introducing these flaws on purpose, that always seemed a bit egotistical to me (kind of a “well, I could be perfect if I wanted to, but I think I’ll let God have the glory this time”), but at the same time, I kind of thought it was a neat tradition.

Then I found this:

If you can’t see it (the picture isn’t as clear as I’d like) that’s a lone purl stitch in what is supposed to be a column of knit stitches in 2×1 ribbing.  I generally do 2×2 or 1×1, so the 2×1 was giving me a bit of trouble, but I didn’t realize I’d messed it up until I was a few inches past that point.  And the pattern doesn’t really lend itself to surgery, given the “p3 tog” all over the place.

If that were the only problem with this sock, I think I would have embraced the Amish tradition and just went with it, all the while smirking about how I could fix it if I really wanted to, but…

…well, that’s not how it went down.

It all started when I got it in my head that I wanted to knit my next pair of socks with Tofutsies.

I picked a stitch pattern, and swatched to determine how many stitches to cast on.

This was the first place I thought “er, maybe this won’t work out”.  See how the picture is really pretty and elegant, and the swatch just…isnt?  That’s largely due to the fact that the knitting in the picture is severely blocked, and since my socks will, er, likely never be blocked in their lifetimes, that should have given me a clue.

Still, I thought maybe being stretched around my foot would kind of act like a pseudo blocking, so I figured out how many stitches I needed to get around my foot and stretch to get over my ankle, and I did some math to come up with cuff ribbing that would flow into the pattern, and I was off.

At this point, I probably should have noticed that things weren’t coming out like I wanted, that instead of being elegant and graceful this was just…bumpy.  And angular.  And not what I wanted at all.

I should have noticed…but I’m stubborn, so I kept going.  I thought to myself, “Well, that’s just the first few rows in pattern – after a few more, it’ll even out and look okay.”

It wasn’t until I was two and half times through the pattern (42 rows + 12 rows of cuff), that I tried it on again.  And, well, it wasn’t really getting more elegant.

Plus, around the same time, I discovered that purl stitch.  And in light of everything else about this sock, it seems like it’s just foolish to keep going.  It’s off to the frog pond for this one.

Because, you know, I’m not Amish.

…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 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…