Catastrophe.

So there I am, knitting blithely along on my Mystic Waters, la di da, this is nice easy knitting, as long as I can figure out how to keep my pattern propped up...

At row 123, I felt something weird a bit down in my knitting. Oh, it's a dropped stitch. No... It's... one, two, three, four dropped stitches. But... I have the right stitch count here. I must have dropped them out of decreases further down.

Having blithely told people over and over that all you have to do is drop down the offending section and reknit it, I decided to do this thing myself. Apparently I'm better at giving advice than at actually knitting (those who can't do, teach?), and I just can't seem to fix it at all. Perhaps it's because it's way over on an edge, so I'm not just dropping stitches, but I'm also creating them as I pick it back up.

I'm about this close to just ripping the entire thing out and starting over -- I can't even find a proper non-patterned row somewhere further down to put a lifeline in, so I'd have to rip the entire thing all at once.

This, of course, is what I get for the hubris of alpaca laceweight on Addi Turbos, and chobbling off all my fingernails so I can't use them to pull my stitches into proper decreases. I think I'm going to give this one more try (I'll probably have to rip back the entire corner and then try to rebuild the whole thing), and then just rip the entire business and start over again after the holiday.

Try, try again?

So there I am, cheerfully knitting away at the blue Shedir, and about half-way through the third set of cables, I realize that there's no way this is going to be a one skein project. I turned it upside down, and also realized that not only could I get my entire head into it without stretching it, I was probably going to be able to stuff one of the cats in there too if I kept going the way I was.

I ripped the entire thing. The Calmer is now sitting in a ball on my knitting table mocking me, and waiting its chance on the size 2 needles. I'd started with the recommended size 3s, but since it was coming out too big, I've decided to drop an entire size and see how much that helps before I start throwing the yarn ball at my computer and yelling at the designer for claiming that this project could be done in one skein on 3s. The yarn is really stretchy and I was making a point of not stretching it out too much when I was knitting it, so that might also be making a pretty big difference. I have a photo essay of the poor thing's death throes that I'll post as soon as I can find a camera cable.

My quest for a "quick" project continued. I'd always meant to make a Baby Surprise Jacket, and finishing off the Log Cabin O'Doom means that I had about three full balls of Cascade 220 (split among the 5 colors, of course, but that's still quite a bit of yarn). Ding! I cast it on yesterday afternoon sometime, and just now finished weaving in all the ends. It's not actually finished, because I want to throw it at TG and see if he can correctly origami it into its proper shape. I think it's actually fairly easy, because the way I set up the stripes was to change color any time I found an instruction. (So the first 8 rows are one color, and then you run out of actually written row-by-row directions, so I changed color. I changed again two rows later because she's got you doing special increases, etc.) I know what the various instructions were for, so I know where the pieces go.

The BSJ was pretty easy -- I did use the "notes" sheet that's floating around online, but I only needed it in one place, right at the beginning, and I flat out ignored it in several places afterwards because her interpretation of the directions didn't match mine. I'm mostly pleased with it, although in one place I wound up having to change colors on the wrong row, so there's one place where the stripes aren't seamless. I have some varigated Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted allocated for another BSJ, and I think that'll be lovely because every row will have the color-change dashes, so you won't be able to tell where things happen at all.

Photos of that either her or on Ravelry tomorrow, when I've got actual light to work on. Actually, maybe Tuesday -- I'm going to a law school forum thing tomorrow, and I may be too fried in the morning to take photos, depending on how neurotic I decide to get about the whole thing.

I don't think I actually did anything non-knitting related this weekend, really. TG has a loaner parachute for the next couple of weeks (he's looking at changing sizes, so he's borrowing possibilities from the manufacturers to see how he likes them), so he's been off at the drop zone skydiving all weekend. Yesterday my friend N. came up from school, and we walked to the knitting stores around here and then came home and wound up her yarn before I sent her off to do her homework. (No serious yarn porn from me, sadly -- all I got was three skeins of Misti Alpaca laceweight, which she bought for me as a late birthday present.) We also had our friends R. and L. over for dinner, when I discovered that as easy as the BSJ is, it's not great company knitting because of all the counting. Today, I did mostly nothing but knitting, although I must now go get my laundry out of the machine and pay attention to it.

Oh, and I bought a spinning wheel last week. It's not in very good shape, but I think with some TLC, it'll be very nice. I'll post all about that later, though, since the laundry is calling and this entry is already quite long. Hope you had a nice weekend too!

Phew...

The log cabin is almost finished. It's off the needles, but it still needs to have its ends woven in. It's already been claimed by S. and Grace the cat as their new mutual favorite thing in the house (including both me and TG). Fortunately, I was smart enough to weave in most of the ends as I went, so I've only got four or so, and I'll do that as soon as I get around to being in a finishing kind of mood (or I get tired of seeing something not-quite-finished being dragged around the house by various friends and pets).

Instead of casting on for Mystic Waters, though, I decided I needed something quick and rewarding to work on as a present for having finished two of my three big projects, so I now have a Shedir on the needles for my friend A. TG bought me some Calmer when we went and looked at the Eco+ for the Hemlock Ring blanket, so I'll have a couple of projects coming up in non-substituted yarn.

I'm not loving the Calmer -- it's splitty beyond belief, and I still have my doubts about the stitch definition. I mean, I've seen the original in the Knitty special issue, but mine doesn't seem to be doing that. Perhaps my gauge is off. But really, I'm hating trying to cable this stuff -- I don't use cable needles, so between the splitty and the slippery, it's kind of a pain. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure A. will love it, and since I have two balls, perhaps I'll make another one and be used to it by then. (And no, I never did actually learn to properly cable with a real needle -- I find it fiddly and actually more difficult than just figuring out how to not drop the stitches in the first place.)

It does feel good to have something I can make visible progress on in less than an hour, though!

Turtles and photos and blog clients, oh, my...

Someone pinged me on Ravelry to ask if they could use my Barbara Walker Turtle scarf as the "official" Turtle Pattern photo. Somehow, this terrifies me. Out in the big wide world, people are going to see my acrylic knitting as the ur-Turtle. Now, I know that people don't really expect the photos of stitch patterns to be anything like as good as the photos of actual patterns, but still, somehow I'm worried that I'm going to get hordes of Barbara Walker fangirls pinging me and asking how I could possibly think that my Caron Simply Soft play-knitting was good enough to be used as The Photo for this pattern. (See what I worry about when I'm not busy enough?)

In actual knitting news, the grey Pi is done. Finished. Well, almost over with, really. It's off the needles, at least, which means it can go marinate in my "to be blocked" pile until I can stand the sight of it. No new photos, but since I haven't put one here before, here's the old photo of it (several dozen rows before it was finished, but looking about the same, except this photo's got needles in - not that you can see them here, but if you could, they'd be size 4 Addi Turbos):




Although I was desperately tempted to go ahead and cast on for the Mystic Waters mystery shawl that I've got clues for and am way behind on, I decided to virtuously try to finish at least one more project before I did. Not that I was sensible and picked the cabled scarf I've got half a ball of yarn left on, oh, no. I picked the Log Cabin of DOOOOM, although I must admit that it's because the LCoD has gotten too big to be anything other than messy sitting around in the living room, and I think it's starting to bother TG. (I realized reading over the first few entries last night that I have been inconsistent in my acronyms,and I shall have to fix that).

My camera's screen is broken and I can't afford to have it fixed, so this is going to continue to be a photo-light blog, at least in terms of new projects. I am solemnly assured by my own experience and other knitbloggers that there must be a picture in every entry, though, so I think I'm going to start blogging the old projects, so that we can memorialize my "oooooh, knitting" phase (before I got to the "oooooh, knitting with things that aren't made from dead dinosaurs" phase I'm in now, you see). Hopefully that'll encourage me to post more often, too, because I'm starting to feel guilty about neglecting the poor little blog. I downloaded a whole new web browser; just so I could have a blog client, so we'll see. (ETA: And it looks like that client screws up the HTML so badly that I'm not really sure that it's any good either. Feh.)