Redo
Once upon a time (about two years ago) I started a pair of gloves. I bought a single skein of that rare commodity known as Koigu off the internet and set off with high hopes. I was not that far from the fingers when I was forced to realise that it wasn’t working out. There wasn’t as much contrast in the yarn as there should have been, even against a black background which is not my favorite colour to knit with and as a result some of the edges of the pinwheels had disappeared. (I blame the colours on the monitor rather than me just thoughtlessly picking a skein that was pretty) I’d also made a mistake in the pattern and rather than fix it and live with the dodgy pinwheels I ripped it all out. The Koigu is now part of the pile of odd bits of sock yarn.
Enough time has passed now for the memory to have faded, so much so that I looked at the pattern and could not remember what it was that I’d done wrong the last time. A pinwheel blade starts with one stitch and increases to four or starts with four and decreases to one. How hard can it be? This time I chose my yarn more carefully, dark grey rather than black and a subtly shaded light grey as the contrast (Auracania Ranco sock yarns). I think I’ve got to exactly the same place as I reached last time because I’ve just realised that I’ve made made exactly the same mistake as last time. Now I remember what I did wrong the last time. I’ve been concentrating so hard on getting the pinwheels right that I’ve overlooked that a plain line at the top of the pattern and a plain line at the bottom of the pattern is two plain lines, not the one that I’ve made. It does matter because of the way that the pattern continues up the fingers and anyway, it matters because it matters to me. Having knitting off the needles is always dangerous because it’s so easy just to rip the lot. With this all I need to do is to take it back to just above the gusset but now that it’s off the needles I have the chance to fix the whoopsie in the salt and pepper section above the cuff. I know exactly what happened there, I made the bottom section in the cafe at Millhouses Park on the Sunday morning and the top part sitting in the car outside the railway station in the evening. The first of the car rows is loose and messy while I was adjusting to not knitting the steering wheel.
What have I learned from this? Four things really, I’ve got better at picking colours (although this is so much easier when you’re looking at actual wool and not a monitor), black is not the only dark contrast colour, I can knit dark grey at night and I can’t rely on my memory. This time I’m putting a note in with the pattern to highlight the danger area for when I knit it next time around. That will probably be in another two years, teacher will be getting something else this Christmas. I could have saved the cuff but I didn’t, before I knit the gloves again I may well have used the yarn for something else. It is sock yarn after all.
The other reason that I’ve ripped it rather than fixing it is that I do have other interesting things to knit, more interesting than knitting the same section of glove for the third time. The three ply sock yarn does look like it is worth doing, you can see the orange/brown stripes in the skein and the striping will be clearer when it’s wound (it’s not exactly dry yet, it’s dry enough to knit but not dry enough to wind)
Oops, sorry, the blog has been unavailable for most of the day as I knocked the plug out of it this morning while I was putting some books away. It just goes to show the dangers of tidying up. As I’ve had no internet to eat my time I do now have a decent part of a sock cuff (and a mountain of ironing to put away) but that will have to wait for another day.
