Monday, May 19, 2008

I Gotta Tinkle!

Greg brought me a present from the event.


He said they call it a "tinkle," a mini-mini inkle loom made just for the purpose of testing designs, so you don't have to spend all the time (and use up a lot of fiber) on the regular inkle loom just to try things out. How cool is this? It came with extra pegs, which you can add to any of the extra holes in the board, to - I assume - make things different sizes. Or regulate tension. Probably adding pegs at the beginning and then taking them out as you weave would help with tension, since bands get tighter as you weave them.

I'm looking forward to playing with this ... and dying to try out the loom I haven't gotten to yet ... so much fiber, so little time *sigh*

Sometimes I go through phases, months long even, where I'm not the least bit interested in knitting. Then other times I become completely obsessed with it. Guess which one I'm in now? I had four days off and could barely get myself to put it down. The only things I got done yesterday were washing and drying some laundry (not put away yet), washing most (not all) of the dishes, and sorting through a stack of mail on the kitchen table. Other than that, kept knitting.

Eventually this phase will wane, too, and I'll get back to being obsessed with weaving.

I'm making good progress on the shawl. I got a lot done last night, and (knocking on wood with crossed fingers) made no mistakes. Even while watching TV. I think I sorted out what the biggest problems were. Of course, dropped yarn-overs is always a concern. Two other things were contributing to my problems Saturday night. I've noticed that in this fine a yarn, my yarn-overs tend to roll over on top of the stitch next to them, and when I come to them across the wrong side row, they look like one stitch. If I'm not paying attention and purl them together as one stitch (very easy to do), then when I get back to the right side, I'm short a stitch in that section.

The other thing that was causing me grief is that the stitches right next to my ring markers are constantly rolling over the marker, and ending up on the wrong side of it. When I would get to the end of a section and be a stitch short, I'd assume I made a mistake, rather than checking to see if the missing stitch had actually migrated to the next section.

I've more or less solved these problems by knowing they exist and watching out for them, and by counting stitches as I knit, on both wrong and right side rows. Since the pattern repeats are only a convenient 8 stitches wide (except the center panel, which is 11), it's very easy to check each little section as I go, and know at the end of the row it's all correct. Checking the whole row at the end is a bad option, for the same reason it quit working on Triangles - when the shawl begins to get bigger, spending the time to go back over a whole row and count all those stitches is (a) something I'm not patient enough to do, and takes more and more time as the project progresses - time I could be knitting; and (b) leaves more room for error because of counting so many at once. Not checking at all is just kind of dumb (and I don't know why I wasn't doing this before).

But checking 8 stitches at a time, I can keep up with. And this kept me on track all last night. So I'm optimistic about Snowdrop, and it's progressing quite nicely.

I also think I figured out how to fix my 'frame' dilemma on the sweater. More on that when I try it.

But now *sigh* it's time to go get ready for work. Culture shock, to be sure.

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