I know that posts of this sort are usually an update on what’s being knit, but this will be a bit more of an update on what’s been ripped out.
The listings over there to the left listing what’s on my needles. It’s not accurate. I’d cast on for the Little Child’s Sock [Ravelry Link] from Knitting Vintage socks. I was using some Trekking XXL that I purchased a while back. After knitting about 4 inches of the leg, I decided that I didn’t like the combination of yarn and pattern. I ripped it out right then; I never even got a photo of it. I determining now if I’ve got another yarn that will be appropriate for the pattern, because I’d become fairly excited about knitting it.
As for the Orenburg lace shawl in cobweb weight yarn, it too has been ripped. I was working on it on size US0 (2.0mm) needle, but neither of the size 0s that I own seemed small enough or pointy enough to deal with the yarn. It’s funny because one of the needles usually seems much too pointy to me for its usual duty of sock knitting. With the fine lace, it just seemed as if I was trying to force huge, blunt ended needles through the knitting. I was considering trying a smaller needle to see if my results were any more successful. The idea of knitting with a 000 or 0000 is a bit daunting.
Even with the needle dilemma, I hadn’t planned to rip out the small piece of border I’d knit (about four inches). However, fate intervened as I was knitting one evening. I’d been sitting in my chair, the one that I like to knit in. I decided to get up and get a drink from the kitchen. Somehow, in this process, the yarn got wrapped around my leg. As I moved away from the chair, the fine yarn snapped under the tiniest bit of pressure. Since I’ve got extra yardage on that yarn, I decided to put away the project and start the shawl over on the tinier needles.
That’s it. There’s no photos or interesting knitting. Hopefully the new yarn/pattern combination will work well for the Little Child’s Socks, and I’ll have knitting to talk about.
Today, I finally got around to blocking the Handsome Triangle Shawl from Victorian Lace Today. Once it dries, I’ll find a way to take some nicer photos of it. In a previous post, I’d hoped to have this shawl blocked more than a week ago, but life threw me for a loop that I wasn’t prepared for.
When I started the blog, I swore that I’d keep it to mostly knitting content, that the world didn’t need commentary on my daily life. But, the last ten days have been tough, and I think it would be helpful to get it out. So…
Warning – no knitting content follows.
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I’ve never really been one of those knitters with eight million projects going at the same time. I tend to be faithful to one “big” project and maybe a pair of socks. Items in my works in process pile usually get finished before I begin a new project. Usually.
Back in early January, I cast on for the Handsome Triangle shawl from Victorian Lace Today. I raced through the shawl. The pattern was easy to memorize, the yarn wonderfully soft. It was such enjoyable knitting. The yarn was handling the texture of the lace nicely.
Within a few weeks of knitting, I made it to the last pattern row. I consulted the book to see how the bind off should be handled and there it was…*ch8, sc into next shawl stitch, ch4, sc into next shawl stitch*. How had I missed this? The shawl called for a looped crochet bind off. Now, I have some basic crochet skills, but my crochet is not as even as my knitting. I did not want to ruin all of my hard work with a wonky edging that wasn’t to the same quality as the rest of the work. The best thing to do, I thought, was to set it aside for a few days while I decided what to do about the edging. That was back in January. Tuesday night I dug through my knitting area trying to find my chibi to graft the toe ends of my Monkey socks. While looking, I found the shawl hiding in a box. It looked like this.
There it sat, still at the last pattern row, on live needles, waiting for the bind off. Five months of sitting in a box, not being worked on. I decided to do something about it. Last night I started weaving in all of the ends. Sure, it’s a bit more procrastination before working on the bind off for the shawl. But, see all of the messy ends in the corner of the photo? There’s quite a bit of work to be done on this thing. My goal is to finish the bind off for this shawl and get it blocked this weekend or early next week. Making my goal public makes it more likely to be finished.
In the spirit of confession, I’ll also confess to the following. What could it be? It’s tracking information from UPS. I’m receiving two boxes today, 19 pounds each. What on earth could this have to do with the knitting blog? It couldn’t possibly be yarn…could it?
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