Robynettely

It was a year ago yesterday that I started Manhattan. Now it sits on my drafting table with several hundred ends to be dealt with, and I can't seem to make myself work on it. Perhaps I need to cut myself a deal: When I finish Manhattan and four other things: + Capelet #6 from VK Fall 2005 + Matching Mittens (as yet unstarted) + Matching hat (also unstarted) + Jade + Matching hat (unstarted) + Matching gloves (unstarted) ...then I can buy HF Mermaid. All right, that was six other things. I'm accepting of the fact that I need to buy som aran yarn in the meantime. Sounds like a deal, though. Deal-making is what, the third stage of dealing with... well, death technically, but perhaps I'm a specially morbid person because I can apply the same system to choosing where to eat lunch. Denial, Anger, Deal-making, Depression, Acceptance.

My fault, really. I was here: Pre-frog And then I went to look at the book to find out how the armhole was going to be handled. I'm doing a set-in sleeve from the top down in the round, and the instructions are... well, spread throughout two or three chapters. But that's no excuse for what I did. Rather than increasing four stitches every other round, I did them EVERY round. So I ripped it out. Post-frog That's what, four times now? Five? I am so sick of this sweater.

I used to be queen of the universe. Ugly increases The increases here are really ugly and create a hideous gap. Hole And here I've created a hole because I did the increase on the wrong side of the pin a couple of times and tried to fix it without ripping it out, but I don't think I can fix that hole without major surgery. So I'm ripping it out.

Last night I crocheted the shoulders and the sides and back of the neck of the Ribbed Lace pullover, and it feels much better now. It looks pretty much the same, but doesn't have the same sensation of collapsing around me, so I didn't take a picture. I ripped out Jade to just below the "pickup for armhole" again, and last night during speeches at YMCA volunteer thank you night, I knitted about an inch back onto it. This time, I think I am happy. My increases line up neatly. I have the same number of stitches in each armhole, and across the back and the front. Only 4.5 inches and the stranded portion begins -- so I guess I'd better work on that chart. And I tidied four blobs on Manhattan. If I do four a day, it will be done in 2005. Maybe that should be my goal.

I was apparently feeling dour this morning. Here I am wearing Ribbed Lace by Norah Gaughan from "Gathering of Lace". I wore it all day. The neckline is an inch lower now. Rib Lace by Norah Gaughan The sleeves are too long, also. If I had thought it through, I should have set them in. But this was meant to be a mindless project (as if!) and I'm relatively satisfied with the garment. Maybe next weekend I'll throw it on again and decide if I need to reinforce certain parts of it (neckline or shoulders). While answering the door for Halloween trick-or-treaters, I worked on Jade. I wonder if I can be back where I was (almost at the armhole) by the end of the weekend?

If you go back a couple of posts to the one with all the pictures in it, you'll see a balled up thing. It's this now. Jade... Why yes, you are correct, it was more before. Off to the side of this picture is a big ball of yarn that is most of what I ripped out. There were three problems with it as I see it: The pink wasn't working on the fair isle band. Maybe I'll switch to one of the three shades of blue I have lying around that would work with the peacock. I'm thinking the Danube from harris tweed, but I haven't even pulled it out yet, and I have weeks to decide. For some reason I had six more stitches on the back than the front. I don't know how that happened. My fair isle band was way too wide for my purposes. At 20 stitches across, it made five repeats across the front, and it looked stupid, for all the three rows I did of it. It was also 63 rows long. I think I need to redesign it to be more like 12 x 40. I got over-excited I think on the part where I g...

If Ribbed Lace was meant to be a pinney, I'd be almost done by now. This picture doesn't share the hell that was doing the three-needle bind off on the second shoulder. For some reason I couldn't get it to work out right, and then I looked down a couple of inches and realized that I had decreased 12 instead of eight stitches on the front neck on one side, which explained everything. So again, I got to rip out a couple of inches. I am getting heartily sick of this sweater. I was considering doing the neck next, but then I decided to go the easy route and start a sleeve. Fortunately I have the first one done, so I really might be done this sucker by Halloween. Rib Lace sleeve Why yes, that is a still inside-out, still incomplete Manhattan this sleeve is reclining on. Don't say a word.

But my camera battery is dead, which isn't an auspicious start. Hopefully the pictures will just fall into place smoothly later on. Yesterday I started the front neck decreases on Ribbed Lace. I finished the decreases on the right (the instructions say to do both sides at once, but I find that to be living hell, so I was doing them one at a time). I held the work up to admire it... And then I ripped out six inches. There was a mistake in a whole row right in the middle of one of the knots. In essence, I had forgotten the "rest row", which meant that my knot was two rows too short, squished in the middle. Now, it may be that no one else would ever notice. But as I figure that row is going to fall right across my chest, I would always be self-conscious about it. That six inches was probably about one ball of yarn. Rib Lace Front But I was watching "A Fish Called Wanda" on Family Channel at the time -- who knew they had no commercials? And I got a bodhran for my bi...

Last night I finished the 12th ball of baby silk on Norah Gaughan's Ribbed Lace pullover. I wish I had a better name for it, because I know I'm going to love this sweater. The pattern has five staggered knots, and then launches into just ribs and lace the rest of the way up. I got to the bit above the knots, and then knitted until the ball was finished, because at midnight there was a "World's Best Helicopters" show on Discovery so it wasn't hard to get Ed to stay up past bedtime. I don't have any pictures. This would all make more sense if I had pictures. And yesterday I got a card in the mail from IK saying they had received my package. I think that's a sweet touch, becuase it gives me the feeling they're considering my designs, rather than just looking at them and saying "There's no way we're printing that!" and shipping it all back immediately. This is just an excuse to have a visual, since I've got no pictures. Your Hair ...

Well, more than a month since my last post, now I owe eight. That would be because I spent most of the rest of September finishing two garments for my IK submission package and doing four swatches. I still haven't finished Manhattan. However, two weekends ago I finished the back of Norah Gaughan's Ribbed Lace pullover from GOL, and I'm half-way up the front. Which reminds me, I should measure and plan for the front neck bind-off, since it's lower than the back. I'm shortening this garment by three or four inches, because I'm 5'3" and don't need another 25-inch-long sweater. Oversized isn't my thing these days. I also started a sleeve on "From Selbu to Sahara" from Norsk Strikkegarn. I'm thinking I'll revise the rules about how many balls a garment knit from a cone counts as, because I just can't imagine only getting nine "points" for this sweater. Maybe if something is knit in fair isle at more than 6 stitches per...

I don't know if I've mentioned them before, but I have a set of rules I've invented for myself to keep myself on track. Some are way too stupid for words, like I've never missed a karate class if I've been in town for it on a Thursday evening or a Saturday afternoon. Others are about knitting. I must knit two balls of yarn per week. I think this rule might have originated because once I said I could knit a ball a week to a yarn store employee (at Romni Wools), and she said "surely you can knit two." So I've been obligated to knit more ever since. A completed project (finishing) counts as a ball. A swatch counts as a ball, if I'm happy with the product. This is a good thing, as it coerces me to swatch. In a project knit from a cone, a front, a back or a sleeve counts as two balls. So the most a project knit from a cone can be worth is nine balls. A shawl also counts as nine balls, if it's knit from a cone or a giant ball. I can choose at the out...

Yesterday at a truck stop east of Cambridge, Ontario on the 401, somebody did this to my car. Some people suck Double click on the image to see the total carnage. I am going to put filler on it now. As a matter of fact, yes, I am peeved. But what can I do? I was standing there with my coffee, in the parking lot, staring at it, and other people came and stood around saying they were so sorry. And then, rather than using this truck stop, they were just driving away. I don't blame them. It's the only way to say "this sucks" that I could think of too. What are the staff going to do, look at the parking lot security tapes? I guess that's what I get for being a "bimmer bitch". I finished tying one sleeve worth of loose ends on Manhattan this weekend, and saw "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill", and did a ball of Norah Gaughan's Ribbed Lace from GOL. Maybe I'll have a picture of one of those next time.

I started Manhattan on 29 November, 2004, and I think it's never going to end. It was lying around like this: Manhattan from the inside When I was in Maine and my younger sister saw it. Her comment was "Why would you make something like that?" I turned it right-side out, and it all became clear. But still, I calculated about 700 loose ends to deal with. I hope I'm doing it all right. I also hope it ends soon.

This is Moor. Moor is from "Yorkshire Fable". You might not recognize it. I seem to have deviated a bit from the pattern. You can see the original here: http://www.colourway.co.uk/rowan/yfable/yfable.htm It clearly has no skulls or scorpions but whatever. I knit this sweater in the round, as not specified in the pattern instructions. And then I did "fair isle short row shoulders in the round" as taught on Janine's blog at http://feralknitter.typepad.com/feral_knitter/ Try it, it works. The instructions are written for working the shoulder seam with an i-cord bind-off, but I've never done that, and Moor called for a knitted-off shoulder and why would I want to do that, since I had deviated from the pattern so much? From the outside: A look at the shoulder. To me it's acceptable, but my standards may be low. This is the same seam from the inside. I three-needle binded (bound?) off the shoulder seams, which involved a lot of yelling at my family to be quie...

Yeah, that's right, I've started another sweater, and I haven't finished anything. this means that on the needles, I have four sweaters, all of them winter, and one swatch. Not good. I don't have a summer sweater on the needles at all, and well, it's summer now. Ribbed Lace from GOL The yarn is Elann's Baby Silk in color Pistachio. I started with a sleeve, because that's like making a swatch... right? The gauge is spot on. But I did make a hat for the wee lad Ian. Ed really wanted me to make him one. And the boy wants one of these now, too. I guess I'll have to make him one, since I have enough yarn left over still.

All right, I finished the fair isle vest. I even wore it all day on Tuesday, and it didn't fall apart. I steeked the armholes and the neck, and the stitches did not start to stick out by the end of the day (I think I took it off at about 10:20 after band practice, so I wore it for about 14.5 hours). You have to understand, I'm always afraid things I made myself are going to fall apart as I walk around. Especially things I sew. But they generally don't. It's the stuff I buy at Le Chateau that usually collapses on my body. Perhaps I should take a picture of the vest. I'll put that on my weekend list. Sting - done! So I finished one thing. I want so badly to start a new project, but I have three other sweaters started, and a swatch that is abandoned that I foolishly wrote in my project list, so I have to either return to it and come up with a purpose for it, or... well, there isn't an or. I returned to the sleeve of Admonition. I'd like to finish that before it...

Fair Isle, how I've missed ya! 

These Boots Were Made for Walking 

A couple of weeks ago a couple of the lists I'm on went dark. What I mean is, they stopped sending mail for a few days. I, being unconnected in any other way with any of these people, had no real idea of course. Knit Design list on Yahoo: well, it's not a high-traffic list, so they do occasionally have days go by with no new posts. Except that this was the list owner being annoyed about an on-going conversation about whether it was appropriate for someone to use names when talking about slow/late/non-payment of design fees. KBTH : sending no mails for an entire weekend was just eerie. And this followed on the heels of, a couple of months ago, a KBTH splinter-list I joined (knit mafia) just disappearing one day. In that case, I sent an e-mail to someone I knew was on the list, by finding her e-mail on another list, and she was kind enough to respond and say that the list had been shut down by the owner and restarted under a different name. I never got an invite to join that lis...

So I was walking the boy to school this morning, and I saw a little girl walking along with her hoodie on backwards. She was eating chips, which I thought was kind of gross, because all those crumbs would be getting in the catch basin there. And I thought to myself, "Wow, I am so fashion out of it, that cover on the TKGA magazine a couple of months back, where the hood was being worn in the front, that's actually in style." TKGA is totally fashion forward, and I'm out of it again. And then we got down to the school, and I saw more children dressed like this, and I thought to myself, wow, this trend sure came out of nowhere. And then I saw a child wearing his backpack on his stomach, and the boy said to me, "Oh, mom, it's backwards day!" And he strapped his backpack on his front too. Phew. Spirit day. I am relieved. Webs is having their annual birthday sale, and it includes Harrisville Shetland style. I bought two cones of this last year, and it comes in ...

On Saturday I went over to Chapters and looked at knitting magazines: Family Circle Easy Knitting - Spring 2005 Everything looked too easy. I didn't buy it. Knit-n-style June 2005 Nothing stood out to me. There were a couple of nice things -- a sweater with the bottom "rib" worked separately, kind of cables and lace, then the body picked up from there, and a sweater where the sleeves were lace and the body was solid. But nothing struck me as terribly unique. The models did seem less shiny than usual, but still, I didn't buy it. Knitting (UK mag) April ? 2005 There was one nice all-over cabled cardigan with a stripe of a different color above the ribbing. Nothing else stood out to me. Nothing ever does in this magazine. Wow, another Sasha Kagan floral, too many easy sweaters. I considered buying it for the short row article, but then I thought to myself that I have that covered in books already, so I should save my money for stuff on my list. Sandra April ? 2005 The sh...