Friday Knitting Blog (02/18/2011)

OK, as promised the last of the swatches (see my previous post here) and the failed mitten. 

First the mitten. It's mitten sized and mitten shaped, but when you click on the picture, you can see the issues. First off the thumb is wonky. I thought, in my not so infinite wisdom, that there were not enough increases to make the thumb fit properly, so I added another increase. All well and good, except that made the gusset too long and the thumb and body did not meet at the webspace where they were meant to meet; instead, they meet about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch too high. Thus making it look like a child's thumb on an adult hand. The tip of the thumb is also more bumpy than I'd like, but that was the very last thing that was done, and at that point, I kind of knew that the mitten had issues. The other big issue is the fact that top is unintentionally twisted. The pattern is written for these to fit either hand, and they do, but the decreases don't like up the way I wanted. It's fine on the pinkie side, but on the index finger side, the decrease runs either along the top of or the underside of the finger, and it's noticeable and off-putting. The yarn wasn't expensive, I still have some left, and it was a good learning experience. Amanda says there's no hurry for these, so I'll tackle mittens for her again later in the year. 

Now for the last 3 swatches:

February 12: Braided Openwork. Boring to knit, boring to look at. This is where I really started to question whether I really wanted to continue on with this project or just wished I wanted to. Length was cut short because I was behind and just didn't have it in me to make it any bigger.

February 13: Cellular Stitch. I cut the width of this by 30% as well as the length to see if that would help me want to continue. This swatch wasn't bad, but there are so many similarities between this and other openwork patterns in the calendar that it wasn't unique. 

February 14: Oblique Openwork. There's actually no swatch for this one because there's an error in the pattern that I cannot find a correction for. You cannot expect me to YO every 3 stitches on row 1 of a pattern and never have corresponding decreases. There are decreases in the other rows, but they all have corresponding increases. I checked for errata, and apparently I have an edition of the calendar where they have been fixed. This was the actual breaking point, but I did go on and do one more. 

February 15: Houndstooth Pattern. I wanted to do at least 1 swatch that involved 2 colors (it's been ages since I've done any colorwork) before throwing in the towel. This isn't true stranded colorwork as it involves knitting 2 rows with each color and slipping some of the stitches to bring the Color A into Color B and vice versa rather than actually knitting with 2 colors in the same row and stranding across the back. Fun to knit, and quite lovely to look at. But at this point, I had enough. I conceded my defeat the next day and I've felt much better since. 

The colored yarn is Tosh DK (Formerly Tosh Worsted) in Cherry

At this point, I haven't started anything new; I've just taken a couple of days off. Tomorrow, however, I'm heading to the market place at Madrona (with mom, which should be a hoot) and hope/plan to be inspired. 

See you next Friday with more knitting talk.