fumblingwithneedles.com

I got a few good suggestions on manly-type scarves to knit for my boyfriend. So I went out and bought some gray wool, and furiously started knitting. Then we got in a huge fight, so I said screw him, frogged it, and put the yarn away. And since we still haven’t really kissed and made up, he will remain hand-knit free, thankyouverymuch.

In other less angst-y news, I recently found out that one of my best girlfriends is (FINALLY) pregnant. The very second she told me she was pregnant, I was already buying yarn in my mind. I am hoping for a little girl, because well, little girl knits are just too damn precious for words. Boy things are good, too, but well… I love pink, dammit.

So I started the First Coat by Debbie Bliss (ravelry link) from Essential Baby, but I’m not sure I like the yarn I was using (Knit Picks Swish Superwash in Bubblegum), so it’s sitting in the UFO box for now.

My crazy mormon cousin, who I don’t like very much (not because she’s mormon [well not entirely]) is also knocked up, so I figured I’d find a simple baby blanket pattern to make for her. After clicking around ravelry for about 9800 hours, I found one that was simple, and quick. I didn’t have the book with the pattern, so I figured it was easy enough to improvise.

So far, I have learned two things:

I loathe seed stitch if it’s more than a few rows.

I should never EVER knit while I’m drinking.

I don’t even know what the hell I did. It looks like I decided to start adding stitches.

Now I’m torn. I could rip back and fix that mistake, or I could just keep going, because I really don’t care if she likes it or not. She’ll probably never look at after the day I give it to her anyway. (This is why I’m so incredibly fond of this part of my family.)

Also, I’ve spent about a katrillion hours on ravelry lately looking at shawls.

God help me.

There has been a lot of knitting going on lately, and I wish I had an actual FINISHED OBJECT to show here, but all I seem to enjoy are works in progress, and ripping those WIP right out and starting something else that will probably never get finished. But I am determined, people! Because I am going to Virginia in November, where it will be cool, so I am forcing myself to finish my CPH before then.

So far I have the ribbing on the back piece, and I’m about fifteen rows into the pattern.

I don’t know if my hacky purling skills, or this yarn, but my stitches aren’t always consistent.

I am enjoying the cabling pattern, and it’s moving along nicely (I don’t have any pictures of the cables yet).

I’ve also been attempting to make my mom’s little dog Mackenzie a hooded sweater, but mostly it just looks like I’m making a pair of panties.

I’ve discovered that I’ve been knitting the size for a smaller dog (that, and Mackenzie has grown since I started this thing), so it’s likely going to be ripped out and I’ll save the yarn for something else. It’s KnitPicks Swish Superwash, and I like it. I think the color is called “bubblegum” or something.

My friend’s birthday is coming up soon, so I thought it would be fun to try a SIMPLE lace shawl pattern for her. She and her husband are mystified by knitting. They watched me knit a hat one night, and I thought they were going to lose their minds. Her husband, DB, is fascinated by circular needles, and the difference between them and straights. We had a strange and lengthy conversation about them, and wood vs. metal the other night. I’m hoping that means a set of either the KnitPicks Options needles or the new Harmony set will be gifted to me for my birthday (especially since he ASKED me how to spell “knitpicks”). That would be nice.

Anyway. Back to the lace. I was reading one of my knitting blogs, and saw that the Forest Canopy Shawl was good for beginners, so I thought I’d give it a try. I bought the pattern, and then I bought some laceweight yarn. Well, I don’t think I have to tell you that this didn’t go well. It’t not the pattern was too hard, but the lace was a much finer weight than I’m used to with size eight needles. I can do tiny yarn with tiny needles, but not tiny yarn with bigger needles.

So I was telling my dilemma to La, and she suggested that I try a heavier yarn, and directed me to Elann’s Baby Cashmere. I ordered it, and after I stopped petting it and rubbing it on my face, I started knitting it.

And, while my lace didn’t look perfect, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for not being completely clueless.

Then as I tried to flatten out the yarn for the picture, I saw this:

I dropped like, three stitches many rows below where I was. I was not happy. So I started ripping. And before I knew it, all of it was gone. I really should learn to just put the yarn aside for a while until my frustration goes away instead of just instantly ripping. Anyhoo, I realized that there was no way I’d get the shawl done in time anyway, so I started looking around at smaller projects, and thought of a scarf with the feather and fan pattern. Using the same yarn, I started knitting it with size seven needles, and what I got doesn’t look anything like the pictures I’ve seen on Ravelry.

The patterns between the yarn-overs aren’t showing, and I don’t know if it’s the needle size or what. I don’t know if I should abandon this or keep knitting, hoping that a miracle will occur during blocking and it will magically be beautiful, and you can see the pattern. I’m not too worried about ripping this one out, because it’s an easy pattern, and it’s pretty quick, so I have time to start it over. I just need to know how to make it look like it’s supposed to.

Any and all advice is welcomed.

DOOD. Has it really been almost two months since I updated here? Sheesh.

I’d love to post a kajillion pictures of wonderful knitting I’ve been doing in the meantime, but then, that wouldn’t really be my blog, would it? But at this point, I don’t even have pictures of messed up knitting to show you, because I haven’t been knitting much.

I had surgery on June 16th (and thanks to my jacked up body and its extreme resistance to any kind of normal healing, a second surgery on July 2nd), and apparently, when you’re all jacked up on anesthesia and morphine, you don’t really have much of an attention span for anything other than staring and/or drooling in the few hours you can manage to keep yourself awake.

Before the surgery, not realizing that would happen, I went out and bought a TON of cotton, convinced I was going to make myself loads of new dishcloths while I was stuck in the hospital and while I was at home on medical leave.

Well, that didn’t happen. I didn’t touch my knitting. The only thing I touched was my remote control, to change my television from the crappy reality show I was watching to a different crappy reality show.

About two weeks ago, I finally did  pick up my knitting again, only to get myself completely flustered and confused. So, trellis has been put on indefinite knitting hiatus. I don’t know. Maybe that yarn just wasn’t right, or the pattern wasn’t right (I refuse to believe the knitter wasn’t right!), so I’m just going to put it away for a little while and try something else.

I decided to try sonnet, because Knitty claims it is for beginners. I decided to do it all in garter stitch though, because I wasn’t really sold on the knit/box stitch combo. I’m using some wool I got from knitpicks, and I have to tell you, I’m not loving the yarn so far. But I have a bunch of it, and dammit, I’m using it up.

In more exciting news (I know, right now you’re thinking, “How could it possibly get any MORE exciting?!?”), I am going to try knitting socks. I’ve got a bunch of sock yarn, and making socks was the whole reason I wanted to learn to knit in the first place. I think the first one will be this sock, and since I am convinced that whoever invented DPNs specifically had mocking me in mind when he/she invented them, I am going to try Magic Loop.

It’s so fun to be inexperienced.

In my last entry, I wrote about the frustration of reading charts, and keeping all of the changes in the pattern accurate.

I made some notes on the side of the chart, and color-coded the different cabling patterns, and all was going well. When I saw the cable patterns emerging in my work, I almost lost my mind with excitement. Luckily, I was at work, so I maintained a little composure, but inside I was ecstatic. This was a big moment for me.

Now, if you look closely at that picture, you’ll see that the cable on the left isn’t quite right. That’s because while I was knitting on my lunch break at work on Friday, the jerks I work with kept bugging me, and I had one stitch left at the end of the row. So I went back, and figured out that I didn’t do a knit stitch before the first twisted stitches, so I tried tinking back.

Have I mentioned that I have no idea how to tink back with cables? Because I don’t. I did my best to figure out all those twisted stitches and get them back in order, but at some point I dropped one of them.

So now I’m left with a gap at the top of the cable, and it looks like I dropped the stitch. And I have no idea how to pick it up when it’s part of a cable stitch.

I really wish my neighbor was a knitter instead of pantsless psychopath (I’ll go into that later in my other non-knitting blog.) so that I could run over there for help in these sort of situations.

I still consider myself a completely ignorant new knitter. And so, it’s at times like this that I bang my head on the table and wonder what I was thinking when I chose to do Trellis. La suggested it, and I thought it was cute, and since it’s a baby sweater, it’s a small item, so it won’t take forever. Oh, man. Do you even know how many times I’ve started this thing? More than I’d care to admit, I’ll tell you that.

I’ve never worked with charts before, so I spent a lot of time messing up the pattern and either going back, or starting over altogether. And I don’t mind having to do it again, because I do enjoy the act of knitting just for the sake of knitting, not just for the sake of completing something. And I want to learn from my stupid mistakes and not keep making them. But I think I’m reaching the point of Project Abandonment here. Not yet, but I’m close.

I found myself getting the two different cable patterns mixed up, so I got an idea at work today and figured out a way that might make it easier on me.

So I started going, and noticed the difference it made, and how easy it was, and I felt so clever.

Then I realized something. On the key, it says black squares are purls on the right side, knit on the wrong side.

Um.

That whole right side/wrong side switch eluded me, and I was purling ALL the black squares and knitting ALL the white squares. As soon as I realized what I was doing, I just stopped. I resisted my urge to rip it all out and do something else, and put it back in the plastic bag and went back to my desk (I knit on my lunch break).

Like I said in my last post, directions sometimes confuse me (I never admitted to being the sharpest knife in the drawer). And having to worry about if I’m on a RS or WS row, and if the black square means knit or purl. And while I admit to still being new to the world of knitting, I’m sure there’s a reason that the key switches each row, and why they couldn’t make the knit/purl key consistent throughout the WHOLE pattern. I definitely need to start sucking up to the real-life knitters I know so I can beg them for help more often.

This might take a while.

Well, I’d love to say the cat bed came out really well and that Ike sleeps in it day and night.

But, um…

It felted up A LOT. I put some catnip in it to entice Ike into laying in it, but as you can see, there was NO WAY that was going to happen. Even in his tightest shrimpy-like pose, he wouldn’t fit in that thing.

I have some friends who just found a tiny kitten in their garage, so I’ll give it to them.

I have a bone to pick with… someone.  I’m not sure if it’s my own inherent boneheadedness, but I don’t get the directions for this baby sweater I’m trying to knit. I haven’t had to read a chart before, so it’s new to me.

Thank god my knitting group meets tomorrow so I can get help from someone who actually knows what they’re doing.

I found myself with quite a bit of orange and yellow yarn after making my felted bag a few weeks ago, so I decided to get rid of it by making a felted bed for Ike. I knew that it would have to be pretty big to accommodate his, uh, girth after it felted.
I didn’t bring the pattern with me for the meet-up at Madge’s on Sunday. And I didn’t take it to work when I worked on it this week on my lunch break. So, before I knew it, I had increased more times than I needed to, and had about four thousand stitches on my needle.

Amy, my local knitting guru, pointed out my retardery and put me back on track for having a finished object that would actually
resemble the pattern. But it involved A LOT of ripping back. A whole lot.

When I went back to the row I should have kept knitting on and NOT increasing, I started ripping back the kajillions of stitches that I put on. And they ruffled up and looked funny.

That’s Amy, modeling my mistake.

Now it’s a lot smaller, but since I intend to follow the pattern (do you know every time I want to say or type “pattern”, I always think and/or say “recipe”?), there should be a lot less knitting this time around, since I won’t be increasing so freaking much.

So now it looks like this:

Doesn’t the center look like a nipple?

I had to cast on to DPNs, and I have to tell you - that was frustrating. I had to cast on 9 stitches and divide them on to 3 size 11 needles. This was not easy. Not one bit. In fact, it took many attempts on my part (and poor Caroline [in my local knitting group] to try to help me to no avail) to get it down. I kept tangling the needles, twisting the stitches, and just having no luck whatsoever. It wasn’t until I got the bright idea to cast on about thirty stitches, and practice with a larger number of stitches that I could finally (sort of) make sense of what I was doing.

I have unwittingly become the victim of a yarn pusher. La found out that I had nothing to do at work, so we instant messaged and yarn shopped at the same time. Sometime next week, I will be receiving many yards of Classic Elite Skye Tweed in Upland Green, where I will (woefully) attempt to knit an actual garment.

You’ve been warned, knitting gurus. Expect many emails and “WTF?” looks on my face.

SO. Where were we when last I updated? Oh, yes, I was cranky and mad and yelling at my knitting.

I found some circulars in size 7 at the LYS by my office, so I got back on the hat horse, determined to make it work this time.

I started working, and paid VERY CLOSE attention to the pattern AND to my work, so that I wouldn’t honk it up and have to start all over again.

My best friend Kay called me and told me that they were getting some boxing thing on pay-per-view, and invited me over. I don’t care about boxing (sorry, but if a bunch of hillbillies aren’t making left turns for four or five hours, I’m just not interested), but I decided to go and took my knitting with me.

I should not have done that. I switched the yarn over to the DPNs alright (though, it was very very awkward, I’ll admit), and placed my markers in all the right places, and was very dilligent to follow the pattern for the decreases. About five minutes later, not realizing I had been talking, watching TV, dodging insane 2 year-olds who were trying to steal the pointy objects from my hands, and just generally not paying attention, I had totally fucked it up. There were more stitches on one needle than the others, I didn’t know what row I was on… it was a mess. BUT. I was not ripping back again, and I was past the point of correction, so I decided screw it, let’s finish this bitch and see what happens.

 Well, this is what happened:

Um. Yeah.

So I decided to work the pattern again, and this time it will look less sloppy. I am determined.

Dammit.

Also, to those who are interested, my other blog is here.

I am a frustrated knitter today, kids.  Last night I was actually yelling  talking to my knitting, that’s how nutso I was.After I finished my bag, I was jonesing to start a new project. I was flipping through The Knit Stitch, and the next project I thought I could handle was a simple (hahahahahaha) hat.  I don’t wear hats, but I figured it would be good practice, and the last bit of it involved DPNs, and I’ve never worked with those before.

I’m beginning to regret that whole felted bag idea. Mostly because I’ve cast on THREE TIMES, and I can not seem to get it right. I keep twisting my stitches, and I’ve started over many times. I work to make sure I don’t twist them when I start the second row, but I notice after I’ve joined them, and it’s all one circle, that’s when it gets all honked up. Please please PLEASE offer me any tips and/or advice on how to not do this. Do I need longer circulars? Do I need to be less retarded?

Seriously. WTF?

Man, I really need a new coffee table.