Great Mistakes!

Ever have one of those moments when the end is in sight and you suddenly realize something is way wrong?  Nothing you can really put your finger on, you just KNOW something is just not what it should be.

After weeks of knitting this sweater, I was just finishing up the right front and suddenly, the little nagging niggle at the back of my mind burst and I realized I'd made a critical mistake.  There were 7 rows in the pattern that were knit on the purl side.  I had purled on both sides. 

It wasn't the kind of mistake that GLARES at you, no, it was one of those mistakes that keeps winking at you from the shadows.  Just a niggle naggle you catch out of the corner of your eye.  Would it have gone un-noticed?  It might have, but the moment I realized what I'd done, I was stunned and ready to cry.  Mom kept saying nobody would notice.  It might actually have gone un-noticed, at least by most people.  BUT I WOULD HAVE KNOWN it wasn't right.  It would have eaten at me in the wee hours of the night.  I made a big, big mistake. 

Just as I was nerving myself to frog the whole dadgum thing a light snapped on in the back of my mind.  I could use the ribber tool from my knitting machine to fix it.  To fix them.  I could undo each wrong row and make it right.

I'm doing that now.  See pictures. ;-)  I'm happy now.  And we like me happy. ;-)

The top picture is what it should look like.  The rest of the pictures are the repairs made by taking out the stitch from the top of the knitted fabric and unlatching it down to the bottom ribbing.  The last two pictures are using the latch tool to "knit" the stitch back to the top.  It's not quite perfect, but I can live with it.  Leaving the mistake would have driven me around the bend.

Toodles

A bright and shining Wednesday

The annual burn is on.  All the fields for miles around are being burned.  Allergies in high gear.  I don't begrudge them the need to burn but it does give me a month of fun with allergies.  Not any worse than the other allergies to growning things.  Sort of a double whammy.  There was a thick haze yesterday and there's a strong odor today every time one opens the door.

Working on the right side of Katheryn's sweater.  Doing the mirror image of the left only with button holes this side.  So far frogged twice.  I just can't bring myself to leave even a small mistake in the work.  If it was for me I could but for someone else I just can't do it.

James (the nephew who lives with us) will be 25 on the 5th of next month.  Just got "Tangled" and "Narnia, Voyage of the Dawn Treader" for him.  He's going to be excited about it.  We had lent our  favorite movie "How To Train Your Dragon" and just got it back again.  Yay, one of my all time favorite movies.  LOVE the story line and the intro narrative is just plain funny.  We'll be sitting down to watch that one again soon.

I have company coming today.  A friend with her two small children.  Will be showing off my switch plates.  I have a dozen more to do.  God bless Papa, when he built this house he made sure there are outlets every few feet so there was never a problem with where to plug anything in and all the light switches were handy no matter where you are in the living/dining rooms.  There are 18 of them.  I've only done 5 so far.  My Papa had an interesting mind.  Gosh I miss him.

It's lovely to be able to let the dogs out again.  Once we got the electric collars and had them trained we've been able to let them out together to play and run.  One of the neighbors is decidedly UNfond of the dogs.  Neither one of them are the least bit aggressive but they do bark at strangers so when they visited her she took a pet.  We had them on a chain outside until we got the collars for them.  No sense in taking chances they'd end up in stir because they were curious.

Will make as much progress as possible on the current project.  As I said the other four will be made on one of the machines.  This just takes too dadgum long with only two needles.  The beds are a prodigious amount of work as well, but they don't take months to finish a project.  I can do a complicated sweater in about a week using 100 or more needles.  Time isn't a problem if you don't have all sorts of projects lined up.  I think I'm up to 25 pending projects at the moment.

SO!  On with the day.

Pictures to follow. ;-)
Toodles

Sometimes you just get lucky!

Finishing up the left front of the cardigan for Kat.  Fortunately, I have nieces close by in the same age bracket so will be able to gauge sizes from there until I get measured dimentions.  In the mean time, I am now certain that I will have to knit an insert between the fronts and the back.

That's a little hint/tip/technique I happened upon when a friend of mine brought me a book of patterns and asked me to knit her a suit.  Unfortunately, the two machines I have wouldn't accomodate the yarn she wanted to use.  It was LOVELY but too fine to use on a mid-gauge or bulky machine.

However,!!! that same pattern book showed me that you can do an insert to compensate when you don't have enough needles on your knitting bed.  Rather like doing a blanket in panels.  It ends up looking as if it's part of the design.  Fortunately, since I'm making this sans pattern, it IS part of the design.
OH, I just bought "Sweater Wizard" yesterday.  It's on sale at the source, on Amazon, eBay and strangely on Overstock.com.

http://www.software4knitting.com/  I found it here.  The "inventors" are really nice people do deal with.  In any event.  After agonizing over the loss of my Knitware program for months, this looks to be an excellent replacement.  I bought if from the Sweater Wizard people even thought it was more expensive.  They have it for 20% off at the moment.  It's way less expensive than some of the other programs out there.  When they have upgrades they give excellent discounts for those who have already bought the program.

It was so sad when I found that I had bought a program that would no longer be updated and was only fit for a 32 bit program use.  Everything is now 64 bit.  I only have a rudimentary idea of what that means.  Knitware was an excellent program.  SO, I was left to either find another program or figure it out by my own self.  That latter is not my best choice.

A month or so back I tried the Hat Wizard from "Knitting Software" and liked it.  So when push came to shove, I decided I would give their Sweater Wizard a try.  Talk about your day late and dollar short.  I could have used the Sweater Wizard to figure out how to make Kat's sweater without all this hullabaloo I've been going through.   I'm really looking forward to using this new software for knitting patterns.

I'll post pictures of the current progress later.

Toodles

Just adding a couple of pictures.

My cats and Kat's sweater!  Mikey (at top) and Prince (head towards us) have taken over the dog's sleeping blankets outside the bedroom door.

 This picture is closer to the true color of pink for the sweater than the lower one is.  I'm making progress.  No pattern, I'm making this up as I go.  Three pattern repeats for the back, two for each of the fronts and one up each sleeves.  Well, that's the plan anyway.

 Toodles

And the knit goes on, and on, and on.....

Well, the back is finished.  Yesterday, I started, restarted and re-restarted the left front.  Just finished the second go round of the pattern last night and realized I'd made a mistake so frogged it in the morning.  It's hard to keep to a pattern when you have multiple interruptions.  I don't mind them but do wish I had greater powers of concentration.

Did I mention that I don't do math?  Did I mention that I'm doing Kat's sweater without a pattern?  Did I mention that I'm completely nuts?

Yeah, well I thought I forgot to mention those things.  If this sweater comes out wearable, it will be nothing short of a world class miracle.  If I pull this off, I have promised myself, NEVER to do anything without a pattern again.  I doubt that will stick.  Anything that has any wiggle room for creativity, I'm a sucker for.  My mind just can't help following the "What if I .....fairy".  Did you know there are such faries?  Yep indeedy there sure are. ;-)

Fortunately, today went well.  I finished several repeats of the pattern.  Now I have to find out for certain, certain sure if I'm making it big enough.  I do have ideas for course correction if it's not.  I don't get to see them often so it's hard to remember how much they've grown.  I forgot to mention too that there are four of them to make sweaters for.  They chose their colors and I just happened to reach for the pink first.

It would be good to pause for pictures tomorrow so there's a visual to go along with all this chatter.

Toodles

The "What if" faries

Well, the back is finished.  Yesterday I started, restarted and re-restarted the left front.  Just finished the second go round of the pattern and realized I'd made a mistake so will frog and restart later on today.  It's hard to keep to a pattern when you have multiple interruptions.  I don't mind them but do wish I had greater powers of concentration.

Did I mention that I don't do math?  Did I mention that I'm doing Kat's sweater without a pattern?  Did I mention that I'm completely nuts?

Yeah, well I thought I forgot to mention those things.  If this sweater comes out wearable, it will be nothing short of a world class miracle.  If I pull this off, I have promised myself, NEVER to do anything without a pattern again.  I doubt that will stick.  Anything that has any wiggle room for creativity, I'm a sucker for.  My mind just can't help following the "What if I .....fairy".  Did you know there are such faries?  Yep indeedy there sure are. ;-)  They live at my house.  In fact they live in my kitchen too.  I never can help myself when the fairies appear and suggest to me.....what if you used that ingredient as well?, what if you did it that way?

The "What if" fairies are fun little blighters but they continually lead me off the path of the pattern destructions into the unknown.  Sometimes that works, and sometimes  NOT!  The above was one such attempt.  It is now going to be a tree ornament come Christmas time.  It began in the pattern as a baby sock.

Toodles

Saturday began as a cool cloudy day.  Just the sort I like.  Yes, yes, I know I'm odd.  Then the sun came crashing down on my head.

It was the day of the fund raiser.  Held down town on an empty lot (a green grassy one).  Most folks had baked goods.  Some were enterprising and had hamburgers, hot dogs and other hot foods.  There was a surfit of baked treats so nobody really had a great deal of luck.

Yes, I took my knitted things down.  I sold a couple of hats, baby blankets and one pair of booties.  I think I brought in about $30.00 or so which went to the fund raiser.

Outside of the fact that it was way too sunny for my tastes, a friend I haven't seen in a couple of years stopped by the table and when she realized I was suffering from the sun, she brought me an umbrella which I used for the rest of the day.  Even though I only had the sun beating me for an hour or so before she stopped at our table,  I still managed to be burned on my face.  Had I sat there the entire time 8am to 3pm with no cover I think I would have been really suffering right now.  I have to find a way to let her know how much I appreciate the kindness she showed.

So, now we know I'm not a sun baby.  A too steady diet of duck weather isn't good for one, but I don't think I'll ever really like being out in the sun.

I'm back working on my nieces sweater.  Yes, I picked up the needles as soon as I got home.  The remainder of the knitted things will probably go into a store downtown in the Fall.  However, I am going to knit a few more baby blankets and see how they do through the summer.  Thinking of trying my hand at cotton yarn for bibs, burp rags and such as well.  We'll see if I can work that into the program.
So, back to designing Kat's sweater.
Toodles

Is it really so long?

It's stunning sometimes to see how fast time flies.  So many things get in the way when you're trying to be diligent about blogging.  Been doing so much knitting for a fundraiser and making mistakes and getting things done.  I was so sure I'd be blogging on a regular basis, (like daily) and it just isn't working that way.

Still, here is a picture.  This was supposed to be a baby sock but it turned out only big enough to be an ornament.  I'm considering making a whole string of them during the coming months and making a garland of ornamental socks for the Christmas tree this year.  We'll see how that goes.  Life doesn't always go as planned. ;-)

The boots are to show size differential.  The sock is about two and a half inches in length.  Back to the drawing board.  I really must figure this out.