It's stupid o'clock

Do you know where your T-pins are?



If alien anthropologists were to study my fiber habits, they would no doubt conclude that blocking could only be accomplished after stupid o'clock, usually while extremely hungry. I seem unable to block things at a reasonable hour. Sadly, alien anthropologists, there is no benefit to blocking things this late, no magical power in pinning things out by moonlight. It's just that once I finish a million-mile-long bind off, I tend to underestimate the amount of work that goes into blocking.



You'd think I'd learn. Even with the blocking wires, which have speeded things up considerably, I can easily take two hours to get a shawl pinned out, and most of that time is spent bent like a frog sticking pins into the carpet while my knees and back scream for mercy. But the thing is, once you get going, you can't just stop and come back another day. The wool is getting dryer every minute. There's no time to waste.

So here I am again, physically tired, very hungry, quite tired, but unable to sleep, because I'm on a blocking high. And this shawl wasn't even lace.

I think I will go eat something.

This is my city

I took a walk.

I took my camera.

This is what my camera saw.

One of these things is not like the other

Let's play a little game, shall we?

One half of this sleeve was knit at my local stitch and bitch. One half was knitted at home, parked on the couch watching TV.



Any guesses which is which?

This sleeve, by the way, was taken from my hands to show a new knitter an example of stockinette stitch. The one doing the demonstrated said, "See how this is smoother?" and then charitably added, "Of course, this hasn't been blocked yet." Obviously not. I don't know how much blocking can remedy that sort of knitting. And it was a dry meetup, too.

The cardigan that once had it in for me has decided to trade its orneryness in for the most powerful demotivator: monotony. After the lace pattern on the body combined with the shaping, the sleeve is really pretty boring. I now have this much sweater done:



...and it looks like I'm on track to finish well within my deadline of the end of the month.

More challenging is going to be the Huepow's Garden shawl. Last time you saw it, it looked like this:



And now it looks like this:



This is the hardest thing about knitting triangle shawls from the center neck out. You start with rows that are four stitches wide and sail gaily along as the rows get wider and wider. Then you get to a point where you are pretty comfortable with the row length, which for me is at about half the finished width, and realize it's just going to keep growing. But by the magic of geometry, when you reach half the finished width... you're only a quarter of the way done knitting. You're feeling maxed out on the rows, and you have to do what you did three more times.

And then, of course, you have the pleasure of casting off something like two thousand stitches, being very, very careful to do it loosely enough that it will stretch during blocking, because heaven help you if you have to unpick those two thousand cast off stitches to redo them. It's enough to drive a woman to the bottle, but apparently that also has a detrimental effect on the average knitter's ability to execute a simple bindoff with accuracy (although the tension might no longer be an issue).

Right now, I am about two third of the way done with this shawl, and I can only knit a row or two at a time without feeling ready to burst into tears, eat a lot of chocolate, or throw the shawl into the street to be dragged away for nesting material by squirrels and raccoons. So far, only the promise I made to show it off at my LYS has stopped me. But will this one be done by the end of March? ...I might have to cheat and bind off early, if I care about my sanity or the health of my liver.

Definite signs of progress

After the great swatch disaster of last post, in which I was cruelly deceived by a malicious tension square, I set aside the cotton stuff and took refuge in wool.

And I just kept knitting and knitting and knitting.



In keeping with the theme of geeky knits, this is a video-game-inspired shawl. Not as obvious as the Ood, but perhaps even more dorky. The inspiration came from this guy:



...who also goes around looking like this:



That, of course, is Huepow. Klonoa's best buddy, masquerades as a Wind Spirit, prince of the Moon Kingdom (that's where the colors come from). Even in his humanoid form, he does a fair bit of floating. That gave me some trouble, because the HPKCHC assignment I'm making the shawl for requires the depiction of the magical creature's tracks, and what kind of tracks does a floaty wind spirit leave?

Well, I'll tell you.

Beaded ones.



Instead of prestringing beads- because that's just annoying- I added the beads as I knit, pulling each stitch through the bead with a #12 steel crochet hook. (And if you're wondering how big a #12 steel crochet hook is, just imagine how many angels could dance on the head of a pin... and cut that number in half. That's how many fit on the head of a #12 steel crochet hook.)



After my first successful go at beaded knitting, I was feeling pretty confident in my abilities. That swatch had played tricks, sure, but I am a college graduate, and I'm pretty sure my yarn is not. I could outsmart this thing.

Having played by the rules of swatching and been mercilessly beaten at the gauge game, I threw away everything I ever learned about swatches, picked a needle size that sounded good, and cast on the number of stitches for the size smaller than I wanted. In a logical world, in which the normal rules of swatching applied, this would have given me a piece of knitting either three or fifty inches wide. Instead?



22.5" on the freaking dot.

Now all I need is for someone to reassure me that this:



...will be resolved with a good steam blocking.

Lies, damn lies, and swatches

I have been lied to. I have been let down. Betrayed. Mislead. Scammed by a piece of string.

I know it's not all that unusual for a swatch to lie, but boy, this was a whopper, a BFL, a lie of truly epic proportions.

I'm attempting to knit a DROPS cardigan in DK-weight cotton, but I have to say at this point, it's not going well. It starts like this:

I swatch. I measure. My gauge is too small. I block, just in case. I measure. Still too small. Okay, I rip out the swatch.

I go up a needle size. I swatch. I measure. I block again, just in case. This time, the gauge is perfect.

I cast on 118 stitches, which should give me a 22.5"-wide piece of knitting.

It doesn't.

I work a few rows, measure, and stare blankly at my tape measure. I finger-block the knitting experimentally. I am four inches in to this sweater, and the 22.5" back? It is 26" wide. And that's before I attempt to stretch it. Remember, this sweater is cotton, which means it's supposed to have negative ease.

Four inches over 26 inches is quite a change, so I go down two needle sizes and start over. I would have declared it beer o'clock, except that my SnB meets in a decidedly dry coffee shop. Instead, I chugged a hot chocolate and cast on 118 stitches again.

I knit to the beginning of the lace section and stop to take a measurement, because now I am wise to the cotton's wily ways. This proves to be a valuable moment of clarity, as the 22.5" back now measures 24" precisely.

At this point, I feel I ought to offer an apology to the other patrons of the shop, as my remarks about the sweater became a bit heated. My engineer buddy and I did some quick math- in a moment of stunningly clear foresight, I had brought a calculator along in my knitting bag- and I realized that there was no way on earth I was going to get gauge with this yarn. I would be knitting on pins before I got the required gauge.

I needed to reduce the number of stitches.

At this point, having been working on this confounded sweater for approximately five hours, with a small break to crash the sale at the LYS, I decided I was done. Really done. To console myself, I attempted to begin a simple triangle shawl, could not figure out how many stitches to cast on, could not figure out where to place the decreases, ripped it all off the needles, and called it a night.

An arithmetic analysis of my knitting tonight would show that I achieved the impossible: a negative stitch velocity. I knit continuously through tonight's SnB, and at the end of the night I had less knitting to show for it than I came in with.

I think I may cry.