Friday Knitting Blog (09/02/2011)

Once again, it's Friday night, and here I am with knitting blog. Here's where we are this week: 

First up, it's the Honeybee Cardigan. It's not very long yet, but this is just a portion of what's been a crapton of work. The ribbing, as I noted last week, was slow going, and then before starting the pattern row, I had to increase from 262 stitches per row to 294.  If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have to increase or decrease stitches evenly across a row of knitting, this handy little link is the answer to your problems. You tell it how many stitches you have and how many you need to increase (there are links within this page for decreasing and other calculators), and it will come up with the spacing. I've used this on other projects in the past, and it saves a lot of time.

The yarn is actually even prettier than this in real life. I didn't finish the pattern repeat (row 6) until after dark, so these are indoor flash-type pictures. Maybe I can get daylight ones next week.  

Then for the main pattern. It's not precisely complicated and the pattern is actually pretty easy to memorize. However, (she said ominously) there is purling 2 together through the back loop (with or without the wailing and gnashing of teeth, you pick), and then there's row 5.  In row 5, there's this little maneuver where you cast on 4 stitches in mid row with the backwards loop method not once but twice per pattern repeat. In the size I'm making, that is 16 times 8, or 128 stitches, cast on that way. If I knit continental (yarn in left hand), I think that particular maneuver is more quickly done, but alas, I am an English knitter (yarn in right hand), which means that every stinking time I do row 5, it's going to take me around 25 minutes (the other rows each take about 15 ~ this is some time-consuming shit).

Since I'm sort of crazy (shhh, don't tell anyone) I am physically incapable of not finishing the row once I start it, thanks to my late grandmother. Not only did she instill in me that I'm supposed to finish 1 project before starting another (crazy talk), she has me, to this day, some 8 years after she died and close to 40 years after she taught me to knit, convinced that the world will somehow come to an end if I put my knitting down or away mid row. I'll answer the door mid-row if I have to, but I won't answer the phone, look at a text, or anything else (I might go to the bathroom, but I'll try to wait). In an ideal world, I finish the number of rows required for a pattern repeat before walking away from the knitting for longer to go to the bathroom. Like I said, I'm sort of crazy.

And here's the Kai-Mei socks. Yep, it's a ball of yarn. Reverse progress (regression even). What happened here is that I finished all 6-1/2 inches of 3x3 ribbing (which took a while), knit the heel flap, and turned the heel. Before I picked up the gusset stitches to start the fun part, I tried on to see how high up my leg it was going to and how it looked. Well, how it looked was like a very pretty tourniquet. I am forever forgetting that I do not have the legs and feet of a small Asian woman (Cookie A., the designer) and that I need to make minor adjustments to her patterns so that I can get a sock that fits me without me taking the risk that the fucking thing is actually going to cut off all the circulation to my foot and at the end of the day, when I take it off, my foot is going to auto-amputate (from the lack of blood supply) and just fall off my leg. When I restart these, I'm going to use a needle that is 0.25 mm larger in diameter, add some stitches (6 since it's a 3 x 3 rib), and do some minor reconfiguring for the foot. It'll all work out. I'll probably start that back up when I reach a point in the Honeybee where I can't look at it for a day or so. Hard to say when that will be. 

And here for the fans of the late, lamented Kitteh Blog, is Meredith. She insisted on licking my arm while I was taking yarn and WIP (work in progress) pictures and then posing coyly. 

Goals for the coming week: See how close I can get to the armpit area of the sweater without bursting into spontaneous tears with every pattern repeat of Row 5.