Sunday, October 16, 2011

I Think They Need To Revoke My Knitting Badge

It's been a week fraught with knitting disappointment. I mentioned that I had to rip out 18 rows or so of Mara? Well, last Tuesday I was off work and spent the afternoon at The Black Sheep. Too dispirited to pick up Mara, I decided to start a cowl...one from a pretty pattern by Ann Kelly, who works at the shop. I had the first fews rows of plain knit done and started working the pattern stitch. Well...it's a good thing Ann was at the shop because I worked at it and worked at it and worked at it. We finally figured out that I was looking at each of the ten repeats of the pattern separately and Ann had written the pattern to address the whole 100 stitches. That helped and I got the first eleven rows or so of the pattern done. Even worked a little on Mara.

The next day at work I pulled out the cowl at lunch time and headed into row 12, confident that I was on the right track. And it didn't work out. When I went to back out of the row, I dropped a bunch of stitches, including various decreases and yarn overs. It was a mess and there was nothing to do but rip it out. In disgust I put it aside and worked some more on Mara.

Over the next couple of days I tried the cowl again...about four times...and kept having problems. And each time I would set it aside and work on Mara.

Then, one day, when I was just about back to where I had been when I ripped out, I looked at Mara and saw....the same mistake that made me rip her out in the first place. I think what happened was that when I ripped out before I didn't got back quite far enough and didn't remove the error. So, after a day of taking deep breaths, I ripped her out again. And started knitting only to discover, a day and about 6 rows later, that I had miscentered the spine. Man, the language was blue.

Either I'm an idiot, or this pattern is just so simple that I'm going into auto-pilot and not paying enough attention. I prefer the second explanation.

No comments: