Prime Time Knitter

R Words

Last weekend was devoted to Rest and Relaxation.  The stress of working on all cylinders for so many months got to me and I spent the weekend Revisiting my WIPs.  Now that the weekend is past, I’m a definitely a better woman for it.  I was more mellow and relaxed this week, even though the annoyances didn’t disappear.

High on my list was Returning to Sirdal.  I had stopped work on this nearly 11 months ago after the ridiculously warm early spring last year.  I thought I had to chart the sleeves because there’s an error (or at a minimum some very arcane instructions) in the pattern.  But after pulling out my knitted tube, I saw that I had never completed the neck edge.  That was where I started. 

To shape the neck, Sirdal requires flat knitting in two colors.  Like any one-color sweater made in flat pieces, I’d have to purl on the private side and stranded purling side is not something I was looking forward to.  I consider it a major achievement that I’ve managed to knit English style.  Whenever I try to purl English style, it is truly a sorry sight.  Needles fly everywhere, and the result is a hopeless mess.  I took a class at Stitches East in knitting backward just to see if it would be possible to work in Reverse.  The teacher showed us how pickers would knit backward, and I managed that quite well.  When I asked about reverse stranding with yarn in each hand, she said it was possible but she would not demonstrate it because there was enough to cover without that complexity (as I fully appreciate). 

So I spent some hours on the weekend Reviewing backward knitting as a picker, learning to knit backward as a thrower, and combining the whole shebang into one smooth movement, like this.  My trial swatch progressed from puckered to smooth, and I was ready to work on the Real thing.

For much of my weekday nighttime knitting, I did not have to use my newfound skills.  After I divided for the neck, the next several rows were either red or white, and so I could just knit and purl away as I would on any sweater knit flat. 

But eventually, this happy state of affairs came to an end, and last night I spent almost an hour doing the first of what will be four 260-stitch rows of stranded purling (see the last row knit).  Here is the motif that will extend across the shoulders, and the rows that need stranded purling are circled in green.

 

The sleeves use the technique too because the bottoms are like blouse cuffs with buttons and buttonholes. 

Although there’s still a lot to do to complete Sirdal, I hope that before long (and especially before it warms up) I can use the F-word to describe it: Finished.

 

Tubular

Sirdal finally reached the tipping point where the tube is beginning to look like a sweater to me and not just a wreath of knitting.  Unlike flat knitting, where I can answer the question, “Is it a sweater yet?,” at about the point where I shape the armholes on just the back, I felt as if I knitted and knitted without much sense of making progress.  I also had moments of panic when I thought that the tube might be too tight, and I could calm myself only by steam blocking a bit of the scrolly motif to determine that I really was getting the required 6 stitches per inch.

 

Knitting the scrolly chest motif was totally captivating, and I am getting more skillful at two-handed knitting.  Despite the temptations to knit something else, I’ve plugged away and I’m actually a bit further than the progress in the picture and up to the front neck edge.  (On some of our recent days with summerlike heat, I did cheat and turn the heel on the Monkey sock.)

I have not emulated the gods on this project.  When I recharted the pattern to be sure my motifs matched along the front button band, I neglected to include a red-white-red-white round above the solid natural row where the bottom needle appears in this photo.

So the only thing to do was to omit that round at the top of the scrolly motif.  I don’t like this “design element” as much as the original, but it isn’t noticeable because the pattern balances, and I certainly don’t want to knit that motif over.  This is my first seriously stranded sweater (Laela preceded this one, but there are only bands of stranding), and I'm willing to be less of a perfectionist than usual.  I think the Sirdal body tube is as awesome as it is going to get. 

I have the sense that I’m not knitting the steek stitches correctly, because they don’t make a neat pattern up the front.  On some of the rounds I’ve staggered the stitches of the yarn not in use (usually the natural color) by knitting it on consecutive rounds and I've not carried it up loosely.  I think this will be neater to cut when I tackle the steek—and it hardly matters because the entire thing won’t be visible.   But the tube doesn’t look as pretty as other in-process pictures of Norwegian sweaters.

But now it is time for me to become a thinking knitter.  The pattern instructions for Sirdal’s sleeves have some kind of charting error.  The directions will not get me a sleeve that looks like the one in the picture, which has the row of snowflakes over the cuff.  And sleeve cuffs are always too big on me, so I need to work with the instructions and then chart the sleeve that I want to have.  It will be back to a marathon Knit Visualizer session this weekend.  Having charted the entire front, however time consuming it was initially, allowed me to work on the body tube without worry.  And, despite the pattern instructions to the contrary for the small size, my fronts will match perfectly.

So what has kept me from blogging?  We’ve had an unseasonable burst of warm weather, and my garden has gone from this shot taken in late March, when only my wintered-over spinach was growing:

To this, as of last weekend:

Ed has remodeled our deer fence to cover the entire garden (except for the patch of garlic at the back right).  In doing so, he has given me almost two more feet at the ends of each left-hand row.  In addition to having all my so-called “spring” vegetables planted (broccoli, beets, onions, mustard greens, lettuce, carrots, and spinach), I put in my tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant last weekend because it got so warm so fast.  Working outdoors has used up my blogging time.

We’re going to have to do some serious eating of the spring spinach between now and Monday because I need that row for more peppers and summer squash (zucchini and yellow squash this year).  My fresh spinach salads have been fantastic, but my mustard greens will have to be picked too--and the lettuce is close to ready. The big green rectangular thing at the back left is a trellis for cucumbers, which are emerging from their peat pots right now.  My hope is that it will shade 6 feet of the third row so I can plant lettuce in the shade of the cucumber vines.

Serious weeding and revamping my herb bed are the garden chores really left for me right now, and I hope the knitting will resume its proper balance in my free time.

Fitness Assessment

Despite not blogging much, I’ve been knitting intensively every night for the last several weeks—monogamously on Sirdal.  Despite my flirtation with Colour Your Own, I decided that I need the lessons I’ll learn from Sirdal before knitting much more on Colour Your Own.  I don’t much like the neck shaping on Colour Your Own, but I do like it on Sirdal.  So my short-term goal is to reach Sirdal’s neck before refining the changes I want to make to slim down Colour Your Own.

That leaves me with one more adjustment on Sirdal: the shoulder shaping.  I haven’t quite come to grips with how I want the sleeves on Colour Your Own to look—but that is an entirely different problem that not even Sirdal will solve (more on that in a different post).

Reknitting Sirdal has given me the body tube is the size I want it to be:

 

This picture, which Ed took in mid-April is not very fetching.  I tried the tube on for a test drive right before we both headed out to do some gardening, and I just threw Sirdal over my old jeans and a cruddy shirt, demoted to a gardening shirt because I splashed bleach on it.  But I was able to check what I needed.  The tube fits.  Here’s what it looked like before I began the large scrolly motif that goes across the chest. 

  

It was actually a pleasure to get here.  The lice stitch section got pretty boring, and the snowflakes and wheels are the same as those at the bottom edge.  So despite it being stranded, I did feel as if I fell into in a knitting rut.  This is not to say that things progressed without error.  A burst of summer-like heat last weekend made my brain and fingers sweat.  I proceeded to knit an entire 260-stitch row reversing the red and white stitches, and then used up the rest of my knitting session tinking 260 stitches to take it out.  But for the most part, I’ve progressed.

I did not attempt to weave in the floats on the lice stitch area, and the back of my work now looks like this:

I don’t think that floats of five stitches are going to cause problems.  I’m not likely to poke my fingers in the floats and they do stick to the back because Heilo is “hairy," even now, prior to blocking.  The benefit for me is that the front of the long-float version is much smoother than the public side of the woven-in version (now frogged and ready for knitting again).

I’ve knit about a third of the scrolly motif, and it is interesting because I have to follow the chart more closely, but that is not the big challenge that faces me.  When it is done, the design requires knitting back and forth to create the neck, and that requires purling in two colors.  I’m finally at the point where knitting with one color in each hand is comfortable, and I’ll now have to figure out how all you throwers purl.  It has been hard enough for me to switch from purling as a combined knitter to purling Continental style, but the neck shaping ought to be worth the effort. 

Then it is on to charting the sleeves to correct the error in the pattern and to cutting the steeks—but I’m trying not to get ahead of myself.  Just thinking about cutting my beautiful tube might dissuade me from knitting on.

It ain't fittin'…It jes' ain't fittin'

As I was knitting away on Sirdal last night, just about 6 rows to the point where I cease the quite boring lice pattern and resume the interesting chest motif, I had the hunch that the circumference of the body tube was too large. I resisted the urge to take the knitting off the needles because there are 260 stitches, and the thought of putting all of them on waste yarn had very little appeal.  But a little voice inside me egged me on, and I fished out my yarn needle and waste yarn and got the body ready to try on.

When I did, that same little voice channeled Academy-award winner Hattie McDaniel*, and told me what I could see in an instant:  Sirdal didn’t fit.  You can see for yourself in the harsh light of a miserably rainy day that the body, which measures about 49 inches around, will be swimming on me.

In addition, the pattern has you knit the first three inches on very small needles, and for me this meant size 0 U.S. (2 mm).  I switched to 3 mm needles for the body.  And so the bottom edge, which is supposed to hug your hips, is too small, and the rest of the tube is too big.  The only solution is to reknit on size 2.5 mm—for everything—and that is what I intend to do.

I’m not as sad about this as some would be because there are several things that I’ve done that made me think, “If I had to do this over, I wouldn’t have knit it this way.”  Having never embarked on a major two-color project before Sirdal and Laela, I expected to be at the bottom of my learning curve.   One of those things I would have done differently on Sirdal is handling the floats of the lice pattern.  There are views for and against this, and now I can say definitively that I’m in the “no weaving in” camp.  Weaving in makes the natural yarn show through the red yarn, and I think no amount of blocking and yarn blooming will fix this.  You can see in the photo below that the natural yarn is unattractively visible.

Another problem is that I wasn’t always consistent in my tension, and so some stitches are much smaller than others.  This alone wouldn’t cause me to rip and redo, but combined with all the other problems, I’d prefer to fix it instead of leaving it as is.

So I will start again for the third time (which I hope is the charm).  I have lots of yarn, so I can just use new skeins as I rip and wash the knitted yarn, readying it for reknitting.  So it is back to square one, but if I get a sweater that fits in the end, it is worth it to me.

*Gone with the Wind, which I’ve seen too many times to count, has many memorable quotes.  The one I’ve used for this post title comes from the scene where Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) chides Clark Gable (Rhett Butler) for allowing his little daughter to straddle a horse and not ride side saddle.

The Shape of Things to Come

I spent this week knitting the rose pattern at the lower part of Laela’s yoke.

Although I’m eager to get this sweater done, I have that same sense of loss that you get when you finish a wonderful book and haven’t yet started one as engrossing.  The next few motifs are basically zig-zags, and the only real challenge will be four rows where there are three colors to strand.  The roses were fun to knit.  The motif was just tricky enough to require some attention to the chart, but not terribly difficult.  In fact, I made no mistakes (at least none that I can detect now).  

The yoke in this design is not shaped like those in EZ’s instructions for yoked sweaters or in Knitting in the Old Way, where the decreases are indicated as percentages of the yoke depth.  Laela’s instructions have you knit the entire rose motif without any decreasing (a depth of about 4 inches), saving the shaping for the rows that follow—and placing the decreases between the zig-zags, where they will be the least noticeable.  I’m guessing that it probably doesn’t matter that much where you place the decreases so long as you don’t bunch them too closely, and Laela’s designer decided rightly that it was better not to break up the rose design. 

There are only 25 rows left to go, plus a couple of inches of neck ribbing, and I’ll have my FO.  There is an evening’s worth of ends to weave in and the underarms to graft, but that is trifling--or so it seems now.  The rose part of the yoke requires 288 stitches, and I think I’ll feel as if I’m speeding along as stitches disappear from the remaining 4+ inches of yoke.

Then I’ll be turning back to Sirdal.  The lice stitch pattern goes on until I reach the more complex motifs that begin again near the armholes.  This part of Sirdal is really quite easy, and I am getting the hang of both color knitting and weaving in a long float.  The knitting seems lumpy, but the color-knitting experts on Ravelry keep assuring the novices that the fabric blocks out, as it did on my swatch.  You can see that I've been successful in having matching motifs at the center front, where the button band will be.

Then it is on to consider what to do next as a companion project for Sirdal.  I think it will be an EZ raglan out of stash yarn.  I can’t bring myself to knit an entire sweater in stockinette, and I’ve been looking for a simple wide ribbing to use.  And since my interest is on the sweater construction as much as having something wearable, I also want to see just how the body meets the shoulder.  Matching the ribs will help me focus on the raglan join.  And I think I might add a bit of shape to the body by flaring out the ribs below the waistline.  So some swatching is also in store for me.

If You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It

In addition to dilemmas about English vs. Continental, straight vs. circular, and top down vs. bottom up (socks, sweaters, take your pick), there is a decision to be made in two-color knitting as to stranding vs. weaving in. 

A few mere weeks ago, I was blissfully unaware that there was such a difference, and that knitters have as strong preferences for whether to strand or weave in as they do for anything else where there are perfectly satisfactory substitutes.  I began to appreciate the subtleties of color knitting techniques as I sought for a way to weave in my longer Sirdal floats and as I read Ann Bourgeois book on knitting my Philosopher’s Wool kit.  In the Philosopher's Wool style of two-color knitting, there are no floats at all—every even stitch is woven in.  I was sort-of congratulating myself for managing to strand without puckering the fabric and knitting at a speed slightly better than a snail’s pace, until I tried to make sense of diagrams and web videos showing how to weave in long floats.  At first, I was all thumbs when I attempted the weaving-in technique, and I began to think I’d be hopeless at the weaving-in style of two-color knitting.  Philosopher’s Wool has an abbreviated version of its video, which mirrors the instructions in the book.  But this version shows the odd numbered stitches that I can execute successfully.  Having spent a decent amount on the kit and the book, I didn’t really want to buy the video, despite the many fine comments about it on blogs.  I was determined to figure this out from instructions I have on hand.

Mary Thomas helped a little, with some better schematics:

 

but the real breakthrough came when I stumbled upon this Knit Picks page.  When I combined the photos on the third PDF page with the schematics in Mary Thomas, I had the eureka moment necessary to do it properly.  Knit Picks has added some terrific videos and printed instructions to its site, and I find that I am turning to it as much as to KnittingHelp.  There is an impressive range of topics. 

And so I have used all those instructions to weave in the 7-stitch float on Sirdal and the 5-stitch float on the big region of lice stitches that I just began last night.

Here’s the woven-in red-over-white float. 

And here is the public side.

There's a ridge over the wheels where I changed needles that I expect will block out.  Sirdal, like other Norwegian sweaters, has you knit the bottom in smaller needles so the effect is rather like ribbing. 

But do I like stranding better than weaving in?  I’m not sure I’ll be able to answer question that unless I try both.  Just weaving in one stitch occasionally while stranding will not give me the practice I need to weave in all stitches, and it seems foolhardy to embark on my entire Philosopher’s Wool kit unless I’m confident I can handle weaving in with some skill.  So I am thinking that a good experiment would be to knit the same pair of two-color socks using each technique—in effect, adapting Yogi Berra’s observations on life and baseball to knitting by taking both paths of the fork.

Many years ago, when there were rumblings that the Dark Ages of Knitting (by this I mean the 1970s) were coming to an end, a tiny, narrow yarn shop on the second floor of a block of Greenwich Village stores opened up.  I’m guessing this was in the early 1980s because my son was already born, and I bought some quite decent Phildar wool-acrylic yarn there for baby things.  The store, Creative Needles, carried books by a German company, Aarlan, that were truly amazing by American standards.  I bought one that had baby things, and another with socks and accessories.  I wish I had gotten more of those books.

Among the patterns is a pair of checked socks with a round toe:

 

These socks would be perfect to compare stranding with weaving in (and I'd learn a new technique for heels as a bonus).  The pattern is uncomplicated but appropriate to repeating the two-color knitting methods (over and over until my hands know what to do instinctively).  And I have plenty of this old Cherry Tree Hill Supersock Solid yarn to use for one pair knit in each technique.

So far, this idea for a new sock project is on the back burner. One of Laela’s sleeves is about ¼ done,

 

and I’d like to barrel through the 8-inch lice section of Sirdal this week.  But I will need to practice, and I might as well have something to wear instead of a swatch.

Charting a New Course

Like any new knitter, I had wanted very badly to follow a pattern and end up with the perfect garment. I thought that a venerable yarn company like Dale of Norway, whose designs would have been knit by generations of knitters around the world, would have a flawless pattern.  I suppose it may be crystal clear if you know what you’re doing, but when it comes to stranded knitting I was a babe in the woods.

And, although I am still new to stranded knitting, I’m not the virgin I was a few weeks ago.  My second try at starting the sweater proved successful.  I think the sizing is better, and my progress knitting with two hands is slow but getting better.

The shock for me in working with the pattern instructions (aside from what I’m certain is an error in the sleeves) was interpreting the chart—something that I thought I’d be good at from following charts for lace shawls and cabled sweaters.  Now I can say that I am modestly skillful at understanding the stranded chart for Sirdal, but only after I “translated” it with the help of Knit Visualizer into a form that makes sense for me.  I spent more time this past weekend moving the motifs around electronically so that my version of Sirdal will have some improvements over the original chart.  I may have lost some authenticity in the original Norwegian pattern, but I like my changes.

I had to fix my initial charts because I neglected to represent the back correctly.  I switched from S to XS. This is a unisex size—I’m small, but not tiny—and the actual measurements are closer to a women’s medium than a small.  For XS, I need 131 stitches across the back and 62 for each front.  I originally charted this for only 124 stitches across the back, thinking that the body tube would be in even quarters.  The pattern is no doubt accommodating the button band, and I should have realized that.  I’m glad the pattern writer for Dale was swifter than I am on this point.

But the odd thing about the Dale chart, and I guess other charts for Norwegian knitting, is that it plans to have sides that do not match up.  If I were to knit according to the original chart, my side motifs would look something like this:

 

where the black line would be the side “seam”.

I thought that is how it had to be, and my first version of the chart had such side “seams”.  But then I noticed that the motifs around the button band were not mirror images.  The chart is set up so that there will be a full motif in the front, and since the motifs are odd numbers of stitches, one side doesn’t match the other.  (And, indeed, the fronts do not match in the photos of the sweaters.) The blue line shows the location of the button band when a full motif falls in the center front.

For anyone who has read my blog before, you know already that I would not sleep well at night if my sweater front wasn’t symmetrical.   This problem, in addition to fixing the stitch count, sent me back to the drawing boards.

I approached the new charts differently.  I began by putting the center of each motif at the back center (as is indicated in the original chart), and working outward from there.  The original chart shows the center stitch, but it seems to approach the chart by working from the center stitches in the back to the sides and the front motifs to the sides.  I worked from the back all the way around to the front button bands.  This portion of the chart shows how I started to adjust my chart.

I was fully prepared to have mismatched side seams if that was what it took to have symmetrical motifs in the front.  But when I placed every motif at the center back and worked outward, I found that I could have unbroken motifs across the entire body tube and still have motifs that were mirror images of one another in the front.  Here is an example of my adjusted front, with the purple line showing the location of my button band:

I continued to adjust several of the motifs so that some key part of them is the center stitch.  In doing so, my center stitch isn’t the same as the one in the Dale chart, but it is in the center of each motif (the motifs have more than one place where they can be balanced evenly).  Also my version gives me unbroken motifs across the entire body (no break at the sides) as well as a symmetrical front.

I am now happy and knitting away.  I’ve knit the first “wheel” motif and the stars are next.  Then there’s a huge region of lice stitches to warm me up for the far more complex motif that spans the chest.

I also fixed the steek, which now has 5 and not 4 stitches, but I’ve not figured out how to have the vertical lines between sections of the sweater that are just solid rows of red or white.  It doesn’t matter because these stitches won’t be visible, but if you have a way to keep the steek pattern uniform, I’d love to know what you do.

 

Everything's Coming Up Roses

It may seem as if I’ve taken a break from Sirdal, but I spent many hours over the weekend working with the chart.  I found the chart in the pattern instructions to be very confusing, and because you have to restart it at each side (where a side seam would be on a sweater that was knitted flat), I could just see the potential for mistakes and frustration down the road if I reached the center back and did not have the center stitch there.

Now I know what the side seams will look like and what part of the chart I must start at to get the center stitch in the center back.  The placement of the big motif was anything but intuitive, and my hours with Knit Visualizer should make it easier to focus on the knitting and not gnashing my teeth over chart reading.

In the meantime, I pressed on with Laela, and I’m done with the rose border along the bottom.

There are only five more rows of the stranded pattern before this sweater is in automatic pilot mode—that is, the rest of the body before the yoke that is just plain stockinette.  I had a marker malfunction on the easy one-color brown row separating the roses from the triangles.  Just as I was ending the round, my marker popped off and I just stuck it back on.  Big mistake.  Now that I’ve knit two of the camel triangle rows, I can see that the top triangles will not match the camel triangles on the bottom because I’m one stitch off.  So I’ll take out those two rows tonight, move the marker to its rightful place, and finish the border.

I’m very much enjoying the Valley Yarns Stockbridge, and this project as a whole.  There are some frustrations for me when knitting in the round that aren’t there for sweaters knitted flat, mostly to do with measuring.  I like to check right away to see that the size is good, and I’ve only been able to manage this by taking the sweater off the needles, threading waste yarn through the many stitches, and trying it on.  Laela does fit—and it was worth the trouble of doing that to know for sure—but it was more tedious than just spreading out my knitting and measuring a flat piece.

Now, however, it is time to return to Sirdal, which has had its hem reknit to the XS size and is ready for joining.

I thought all those skilled stranded knitters were nuts when they talked about how addictive stranded knitting was, but I’m falling under the spell.  When it has been time to put my knitting away, I’ve succumbed to the siren call of “one more row” just to see how the motif looks. 

A Whole 'Nother Ball Game

I did not expect my foray into stranded knitting to be easy, but I did not think I’d feel as clueless as I do at the moment.  This is just another way of saying things are not working out particularly well just now.

The sizing instructions, among other things, puzzled me.  The printed measurements for the chest circumference are:

XS            41-3/4  inches

S            44-1/8  inches

When I work with the actual stitch count and gauge, I get something completely different.  For XS it works out to be 42-1/2 inches and for S it works out to be almost 45.  Since my swatch was pretty much on target, I decided to go with the small size.  But as I cast on and knit, the tube seemed a lot bigger.  I’ve just taken it off the needles, and it is about 48 inches.  So, to beat the sports analogy to death, I’m not only back to first base, I’m in the batter’s box again.  

The steek presented some difficulties also.  The pattern tells you to knit a hem (back and forth) and then join, adding 4 stitches for the steek.  And it tells you to knit it in the “ground color”.  I interpreted this to mean the background color, and so I ended up with this:

 

Quite wonky.   And even worse when I turn it to the back.  I didn’t know if I had to strand the contrast yarn or weave it in.  I ended up with the red yarn on the wrong side after knitting the solid white row, and then cut the yarn and attached a new piece. 

 

Doing stuff like this for row after row is going to create a huge mess.  In Fair Isle, you knit a motif like A B A B A that is then cut.  So I did the Ravelry equivalent of phoning a friend and posted queries on the Stranded and Knit a Norwegian KAL groups.  Very knowledgeable knitters told me that I should treat it as would be done in Fair Isle, even adding a few more stitches to the steek to make it easier to work with it when I finally do cut it.

The last problem was interpreting the chart:

When I headed around on the first true stranded round (with the white-red-white separated by three reds), I had half a motif at the end of the round--which you can see in the top photo.  Now this can’t be correct because the fronts will not match.  So yesterday I discovered that the front of the Dale instruction book had a brief paragraph on knitting Norwegian sweaters.  See the “Beg here” note on the chart?  Well, at each side seam, you “begin here” again.  In Norwegian knitting, you do not follow the chart for the whole round.  The fronts and back are separate entities, and the side “seams” may not match. I also found a much better set of directions on the Woolybaabaa forums.  (I bought my yarn from Woolybaabaa.) And so even though fixing this would require ripping only a quarter of a row, the gauge problem requires restarting.

But I haven’t gotten very far, and it is best to know now that I’m headed for a gigantic sweater, rather than knitting on and being astounded later.  When I cast on again, I’ll be using smaller needles just for insurance.

269 Stitches Is a Lot of Stitches

The start date for the Knit a Norwegian KAL was last Friday, and here is where I am now.

I took some time to read the Sirdal pattern carefully on December 31 and found some ambiguities that are destined to cause problems.  The sleeves seem rather like a minefield.  For starters, there is a Chart V that looks as if it belongs on the sleeve cuff, but there is no written instruction to tell you when to knit it.  Ravellers have noted difficulties with the sleeve instructions, and there are varying interpretations of how the sleeves should look. I know that some fun and games are in store for me down the road.  I will probably follow the photo (which doesn’t match the instructions) and wing it.

I also gasped when I saw that I had to cast on 269 stitches.  Then I took a deep breath and realized that this would be a mere 134 or 135 stitches if knitted flat, and I’ve done that sort of thing before.  But screwing up on a row of 269 stitches will have some rather unhappy consequences (not to mention additions to the English language that probably cannot be reprinted in my family-friendly blog).  So last night, when I finally decided to cast on, I expected perfection.  And, indeed, I did not screw up where I usually screw up.  I counted the cast-on stitches four times and was absolutely certain that I had 269, not 268 or 270.  Then I proceeded to knit the first row.  In the middle, I read the instruction “begin on the WS”.  So I carefully tinked back what must have been 175 stitches and began to purl, only to find that I wasn’t picking up the same leg of the stitch consistently.  Yes, I know this is the hem and no one will see it, but it is a bad precedent to start out with a row that is incorrect.  So tonight I’ll try again.

Another reason that I didn’t cast on at the stroke of Midnight 2010, or on the following morning as I had intended, is that my socks were “nearly done”.  Just one more evening or two, I thought, and I’d have my first FO of the year.  Well, I do have my first FO, but it was done yesterday:

I used a pattern from one of my newly-acquired Japanese knitting dictionaries and  substituted it into Charlene Schurch’s Sensational Knitted Socks, the 4-stitch repeat version.  This pattern has an 8-stitch repeat, but it worked, and I like the socks.  I was not happy about the way the Shibui yarn striped when I used just plain ribbing, but it looks ok in this stitch motif.  Still, I would have preferred more subtle color changes.  The socks feel good and look good on, and they stay up and do not bag around my ankles.  I wanted to train myself to knit 8 stitches to an inch on size 0 needles, and I managed to do that.  This isn’t easy for a loose knitter. 

I had some issues learning to twist the stitches that I’ll save for a different post.  I got truly engrossed in the numerous ways one can make left and right twists, finding help in some unexpected places.  Patricia Gibson-Roberts’ Ethnic Socks and Stockings was a huge help (and will be a huge help again when I have to secure my long floats in Sirdal).  I have many books in my knitting library that I’ve not looked at closely for some time, and I will be revisiting them in 2010.  So expect a series of posts about some of these classic, and not so classic, books.  It will be a way for me to refresh my memory about their contents and a way to share what information they contain.

Aside from that, I am not going to make any pronouncements about resolutions—2009 proved to me that grand plans don’t work for me.  I’m happy to have finished 4 well-fitting sweaters, even though I fell very short of the 12 I hoped to knit.  So for now, it is on to Sirdal and a simpler project as a back up…and another pair of socks.