Friday, January 25, 2008

FEMA for Socks

I fixed the sock!!! And I didn't even have to frog it!!! Frogging most likely would have been easier, but if I had ripped it out I definitely would not have had the motivation to make it back up again, so I went with the picking up the stitches approach. It was actually not nearly as bad as I thought it would be!

In case you've never reknit just a section of a knit piece before, here is a step-by-step explanation of how to do it.

Step 1) Shown yesterday: Insert a double pointed needle into the last "good" row where you have identifiable stitches. Just pick up the stitches you are going to be reworking.

Step 2) Shown yesterday: Drop the stitches from the top working needle. Make sure that all these stitches are going to be caught on the bottom holder needle. This is terrifying!

Step 3) Look closely at the ladders you now have in your knitting. Find the one that makes up the row above the stitches on the holder needle. This will be the working yarn for your next row.


Step 4) Now you just pretend now that you are knitting like normal, with this ladder yarn as the working yarn. I have no idea how to do this step using the English method, but here's how to do it Continental. I suspect it is much easier this way.


Step 5) As you get to the end of the section you are working on, you will be working with a very teeny piece of yarn (hopefully your yarn piece will be the right length for the part you are knitting!). This can be tricky, but you'll figure out how to maneuver the little bit of yarn to be a stitch. I just pinch it and force it to go where it's told.


Step 6) Once you finish the first row, look to see if the ladder yarn you just knit with is evenly distributed across your new row of stitches. Is there some extra yarn that is making a giant space after this new row of knitting? I tried to even out the tension by slipping the stitches back and forth between two needles a couple times pulling and tugging the yarn a bit until all the stitches seemed to be about the same size. In these socks, the new row is still a bit loose (there is enough yarn for a whole extra stitch in each row since I ripped it out to remove an extra stitch) but it shouldn't be a big deal once I wash and block them. Because, again, there will be no frogging on these socks, darn it.

Step 7) Repeat steps 3-6 until you are way back to where you started, only with a perfectly fixed up piece of knitting!


Something to watch out for: be sure that the stitches you pick up in the first step are in the correct row (ie, don't pick up stitches and knit row two when the rest of the row is row three!). I made this mistake. I don't care. No one else will care, either. You can't even tell.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Mega Huge Sock Disaster

I call this " Still Life with Sock Disaster."

"Emily," you might say, "how come one of your socks appears to be vomiting all over itself?" Well, my friends, I will tell you. I was one row short of finishing the first repeat of the chart, when I noticed this:

Now, to a normal person this looks just fine, right? Look again. The pattern in between the markers on the left is different than the pattern in between the markers on the right. Again, this isn't really a problem. I noticed this last night, and went to bed and slept quite well, thank you very much.

Except I woke up this morning in a panic about it! I don't want to go through life with one of my socks having a fish scale that is not like the others! Aaaaaaaahhhh!!!! There's no way I am frogging this baby (I say now) all the way to the beginning, because that would just be the end of this whole sock experiment that I am trying. (I hate knitting socks, but decided the other day that my new mission in life is to make Pomatomus socks. Very weird.)

So what do I do? I decided to just rip out this one pattern repeat!

Now, the astute observer will notice that there are 13 stitches on the red needle. This is a 12 stitch pattern repeat. I swear I counted them every single row and I always had 12, so I have no idea what's going on here. I even swear that there are 12 stitches on the needle up at the top where the working needle is. (Hmm... maybe this has something to do with the random k3tog I had to do at one point when the k2tog required by the pattern wouldn't work. Interesting.) "Oh well," I say with unwavering optimism, "it will all come out right in the end!"

Here's what it looks like now. I had to go to work today. Holy crap. I think I better go pray to the yarn gods. This is not going to end well. I just know it.


(=

On a different note, it's damn cold today. That's a -12.8ºF you see in the upper right corner. Like, below zero. Don't even get me started on the windchill. Yikes.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

I finished something!

It's My So Called Scarf!



Up close and personal


Guardian fluffball

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Craft-a-Thon



Oh yeah!! Everyone should go to the Craft-a-Thon! And everyone should design a pattern for the preemies!!!

We've been working so hard on this, and it's coming together really well! Wendy from Knit and Tonic is making us a pattern, Betty Christiansen, author of Knitting for Peace will be there, and there will be fantastic seminars, speakers, and tons and tons of crafting!

I can't wait!

Scarf, Hat

I suppose I should update this thing once in awhile. Oh yeah, I just remembered that I tried to last week sometime but for some reason the picture uploader always crashes out before I can get anything posted. Well at any rate, here is a Fake-Isle Hat and a My So Called Scarf.



Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Skiing

So I finally got back from Christmas in Oregon! On my trip I started both a Fake Isle hat and My So Called Scarf. The hat is way too big, so I think I will frog it. The scarf is going slowly, especially since it's hard to figure out how to fix mistakes, but the yarn is so darn yummy that I haven't gotten sick of it yet, which is sort of surprising! I haven't taken any pictures yet, but I will get them soon.

In the meantime, here is a picture of Mt. Jefferson from a ski trail at Timberline on Mt. Hood.