I've started a new sweater with yarn I found in New York at the Vogue Knitting Live Marketplace. It's luscious. It's sparkly. It's just what I want to wear. Right now.
I can't seem to knit it fast enough. Granted, the yarn only arrived a few days ago, but I really would have liked to be wearing it yesterday. Do you suppose my expectations are a wee bit high?
Also, what's hard to see is the slight, but not scratchy, shimmer in this yarn. Yes, shimmer. Not too much. Not too little. It's really rather fabulous.
So now to the REAL problem...
I spent some time with my knitting group, my two dear friends, yesterday attempting to knit while deflecting my bouncy four year old and knowing that any moment the baby would be up and ready to play.
So, I'm telling them how I thought that the pattern might have some mistakes. That I was knitting and when I would get to one side with the lace there was always something not quite right.
Wrong in fact. I looked back again and again unable to figure out where the issue was coming from.
Yet, I'm getting better at a little imperfection in my knitting and decided to KNIT ON! I did. Yet, every time I came around there was some issue with either not enough stitches or too many or something.
This is the conversation I'm having with my friends and they are nodding in all the appropriate places and letting me talk it out. As I'm doing that I realize that one side of the lace doesn't look so bad. In fact, it was pretty darn close to the pattern and what it was supposed to look like.
The other side not so much.
We decided that I would turn it around and put the "not so right part" on the back where in all honesty no one would even notice.
Our time was up. We all departed to gather children from school. Snack. Homework. Dinner. Baths. Books. Kisses. Lights out. Dinner dishes. Locate the mittens, coats and hats for the morning. Finally, I'm on the couch knitting again.
The clock reads 10:00 p.m. and it's then and only then, that I realize the huge blunder that is mine. One side of the sweater is fine. The other not so fine. Each knit from the same lace pattern. The problem...not the pattern but the pompous knitter with the needles.
Yes.
So, I did the only thing I could think of....I kept knitting. Just faster as though somehow the mistake would disappear if I knit on further. That somehow I would outrun that blunder by shear will of yarn.
Today? Well, I finished the first twenty five rows. I felt as though if I squished and tucked here and there it would work. Yup, that was my plan. I began to straighten out the yarn on the needles preparing to remove the markers and head up the front with the next lace pattern when I saw it.
The twist.
The twist, that the whole time I'd been worrying about the lace pattern being incorrect, I never noticed. The common mistake of ingenue knitters. I twisted my cast-on. I TWISTED MY CAST-ON!
<insert gasp here>
So, for you non-knitters out there this is not something you want to do. In fact, its frowned upon in knitting a sweater because you will have a big huge twist in the sweater. Awkward. Like someone who's tucked their sweater into their underwear kind of awkward.
So, the plea went out to my friends via email this morning and it read something like...
...Amateur knitter on the loose....Rookie mistake being made...Should I try and steek it (straws, I was grasping at straws here)...What should I do?
And, in perfect form the response was unanimously "Rip it out, start over, yours in sympathy." Cuz, that's how we roll. There might have been a thank goodness you weren't fifty rows in which I nodded my head in agreement that it could have been even worse.
So, that's what I did. I ripped it out. The sweater that I wanted to be wearing two days ago is now a pile of crinkly yarn on the table in front of me. hmm.
So, I suppose you know where I'll be in my free time, on the couch knitting when everything else is done for the day.
I won't make the same mistakes again. Well, that's probably not accurate. I will more than likely just make different mistakes. But, I hope in the long run I will love this sweater even more because of it all.
At least in an ideal world.
***Notes on Ravelry***
