GiftYarn!!!! And Needles!!! And Rocks!!!

You know, I've heard of this, but never been the happy recipient of one - a knitter's care package. My friend and fellow knit-fiend Wren came into a stash of knitting needles, and sent me a bunch. Check this out!


I've never knit on anything larger than a 9 or so, so of course I have to jump right on getting some super bulky yarn and knitting something up on those 15s. Just to say I did it.

She also sent me this ...


... a hank of Mountain Colors Bearfoot, handpainted superwash wool! Yummmm! It's awesome ... I'm just going to keep it here on the kitchen table to admire and pet until I figure out what it wants to be.

Thanks, Wren! You rock!

In other knitting news ... I'm almost hesitant to post this, because every time I do, something goes wrong, but ...


...I started the Triangles Shawl over again. I've been very, very careful ... to the point of obsession. I check every row against the chart before I move on. Last night I hit the spot where every other attempt has gotten screwed up beyond fixing. This time I did a few things differently. I put in a couple extra markers to give myself good places to stop and go back and compare the stitches to the chart. Now that the stitch count is getting higher, I want to be able to do this in increments as I work across, rather than trying to go do the whole row at once - that's going to get too tedious and leave too much chance of making a mistake as it gets bigger.

The second thing I did was I finally did the lifeline. Putting it in wasn't hard at all. Knitting around it on that first row was kind of a pain. Since I picked the beginning of a section to put it in, and since the first row of that section happens to be one of the hardest rows in whole pattern (well, I should say, most intricate - lots going on), that didn't help. Perhaps when I decide to put the next one in, I'll move it to an easier row.

I'm determined to make this shawl. One way or another. And so far, so good ... last night I made it past the row that usually screws me up. So, we'll see.

When I was taking pictures of the new landscaping done last weekend, there was one I didn't get because, I believe, it had gotten late and dark. I make amends now. The other project that got done with the pallet o' rocks was this:


The Dread Reverend built this - isn't this awesome? There was a spot right off the porch that was low and everytime it rained it turned into a big mud puddle. We couldn't keep grass growing there. So he built this in the spot, and it's working great. We're actually hoping to enlarge it a little bit later on, when we can get another pallet of rocks. But we had a few rocks left over, and today he's going to build a matching one of these on the other side of the porch.

The yard's coming along really nicely this year. I'm pretty pleased with it all.

But for now, I'm off ... I have a crazy busy day ahead. I have to go into work for a few hours (ugh - I hate working on Saturdays, but I'm too far behind, and with the days I missed this week I have no choice now); go to the bank; stop at Border's (book I want, still have gift cards from Christmas); go to the grocery store; and if I have time and don't run out of energy, I'd like to stop at one of the local garden centers for some things. And this evening, while the Dread Reverend is at band practice, I'd like to get in some practice time myself. I'd like to get back to the studio for another session, but don't have anything ready yet. I've been slacking on this project. The timing's bad - it's much easier for me to work on 'indoor' projects in the winter, as long as the weather's nice I pretty much live outside on the porch.

Anyway, I'm off to the busy day.

Live From Chillicothe (Taped Earlier)

I initially started this post from a hotel room in Chillicothe, but the internet service there wasn't working properly, and I couldn't upload the pictures or finish the post. Now, we're finally home, so we'll try this again.

We find ourselves in a Comfort Inn in Chillicothe, Ohio today. The Dread Reverend's grandfather is sick and in the hospital, he wanted to come down and see him, and Tyler and I accompanied him on the trip.

But he's spending the day at the hospital and with family, and I didn't go because I felt this was more of a private family time - not to mention, I didn't want to leave The Poo alone in the hotel room; the one time I trie to go to the vending machines, he barked his head off. So we're hanging out here.

Tyler's an excellent traveling companion, and seems to enjoy it. He adapts so easily to these things. I think it's been good for him to get out and do something, anyway - he's been very mopey and dejected-looking lately, and I think it's just boredom. The trip has perked him up - he's been alert, energetic, and curious. Traveling usually seems to go well for him. He's been on a weekend trip to Cook Forest in PA, week-long trips to Virginia Beach and Emerald Isle, NC, and I'm sure a few other brief trips I'm not remembering at the moment. I'd love to take him to Oregon, but I won't subject him to plane travel, and we can't get enough time off work in one chunk to drive there and back.

He did really good till the trip home, when he seemed pretty tired and fed up with it all. I think he'd just had enough 'adventure' and was just looking forward to being home. (For his own account of the trip, check out his MySpace page).

Yard Work Frenzy

Wow, what a day. I got up a little after 7:00 a.m. (because I had to have Tyler to the groomer's by 8:00). My plan then was to run a bunch of errands, but I got sidetracked by some rocks. (Does that mean I got side rocked?)

For many years the border or edging of the pond garden was landscaping ties. But they are old and rotting, sinking into the ground, and falling apart. I didn't take a 'before' picture this year, but I have this one from last year, which gives an idea what the landscaping ties looked like.

I had been thinking this year I wanted to pull them up and put in something nicer, but hadn't decided what yet. I knew I'd like rocks, but when I hunted for the flat rocks I edged the pond with, I remember them being hard to find, and expensive.

While driving Tyler to the groomer's I passed a mulch and self-storage place, the same one where we have our storage unit. And what to my incredulous eyes should appear but pallets of large, flat rocks.

I stopped on my way back and inquired about them, and it was great - big flat field stones, a pallet full, for $50. I said, yeah, I'm on it! I believe that to be a very good price for rocks, if you must buy them. Which I must, as I have no big property to dig them up from.

Better yet, they delivered them a few hours later!

So I started this.

So my afternoon consisted of hauling more than 40 of those rocks over to the pond area (there are still about 20 more laying in the driveway where we had them dumped; and the Dread Revered helped me by carrying a lot of them); pulling up the landscaping ties and tossing them out of the way; raking out all the dead leaves from the neglected bed; arranging the new rock wall in something like an aesthetically pleasing way; cleaning the pond pump filter; and ... I think that was about it.

For now it looks like this.

I'm pretty happy with this. No, I'm ecstatic with this. So it was a pretty good day. And now I'm so sore and tired I can barely move. But it was worth it.

Well, it wasn't knitting, but it was gratifying

All day yesterday I kept thinking I'd come home and spend the evening on the porch trying to start the shawl over. Again. I know, I'm kind of obsessed. Part of me really wanted to work on it again (I'm telling you, I was really enjoying it ... umm, except for the mistakes). But part of me was just very, very afraid ... I didn't know if I could take the disappointment of getting to Row 38 and having it all buggered up again.

But circumstances arranged themselves to protect me from the disappointment. I came home, and the weather was beautiful - sunny, high 70s, just gorgeous. And I was looking at my messy, disheveled lawn, and at all the neighbors out mowing their messy, disheveled lawns, and the yard work bug - which has been conspicuously absent during these days of early beautiful weather - finally bit.

My dad handled most of my yard work for most of the years I lived here. Not because he had to or I made him - because he wanted to. He always loved yard work, and once he was retired, just keeping his own lawn manicured didn't keep him busy enough. So he'd come over here all the time while I was at work and putter around in mine. (Well, that, and he just really liked helping me out). I really appreciated it, because living alone and working full time made it hard for me to adjust to the rigors of caring for the outside of a house, when I was a new homeowner. So very much more to do than in an apartment.

A few years ago he became too unwell to keep up with it anymore, and then I was too busy caring for him to really pay it much mind. This is the first year that I've had the time, energy (well, in theory), and nothing else distracting me, to finally take over my own yard work. But I'm behind already.

My dad always told me the most important things I could do for the life of my lawnmower was to change the oil every spring, and keep the clogged grass cleaned out from around the blades. While the lawn did get mowed last year, neither of those maintenance tasks were kept up on. So my first order of business this year was to change the oil in the mower and clean it up.

I had to go find the manual because I didn't even know what to get for lawnmower oil - if you had to get a special kind, or any lawnmower oil would work. Found that, then drove over to K-Mart and got the oil, and a few other tidbits.

Came home, changed the oil (man was that old oil cruddy - I'm sure if I hadn't taken care of it this spring, my lawnmower would have been letting me know in a few months), cleaned up the mower, and then mowed both the front and back yards.

Wow. I was tired. I'm so out of shape for this stuff.

Once I started, there were so many other things I wanted to do ... clean up the rest of the leaves from fall that are accumulated around the back yard fence ... fertilize a couple of shrubs that look to be dying ... dig up and divide that hosta by the pond ... load up all the garbage alongside the driveway into my truck so I can take it to the dumpster at work ... weed-n-feed the lawn ... and 40 or 50 other things.

But I just didn't have any more energy. Besides, I think that's a pretty good evening's work, and I think I deserved to call it a night after that. There's plenty of time for everything else. Or, well, even if there isn't, I can only do so much on one weeknight evening.

I Fought The Lace, And The Lace Won.

I threw in the shawl last night. I gave up. I was so happy that I'd fixed my mistakes in the morning, and much of the afternoon at work I looked forward to coming home, sitting on the back porch (the weather was great again, in the 70s), and working on the lace.

I did that ... and had mistakes in the first row. I spent a lot of time fixing them, and thought I'd succeeded. I had mistakes again in the next pattern row. This just went on, and finally I just gave up and said screw it, I'm just going to "fix" each row's mistakes as I discover them by either making a new stitch, or knitting stitches together, or whatever I have to do to fix the stitch count, and just go on. Maybe in a few rows, with the right stitch count, it'll straighten itself out, and I can just go on from there, albeit with a swatch of completely screwed up lace through it.

But I had given up on un-knitting back to fix these mistakes. When it's every single row, it just got to be ridiculous. At that rate I'd never get more than 2 rows done a night (and possibly have to fix one of them the next morning). No, I didn't put in a lifeline like I said I was going to. Maybe it would have been a good idea, but I know that the way things were going, it might also have just been an extreme source of frustration - continually ripping back to the same place and putting all those stitches back on the needles, only to keep screwing up again over and over would have probably been just as frustrating.

Eventually, a few rows into this new suicide lace-knitting tactic, it got so completely screwed up I knew I couldn't even fix it, and I ripped it all out. Again. I threw everything into the knitting basket, tossed the basket down in the living room, and gave up.

It's very disappointing, because I was really enjoying the process, and I loved the way it was turning out. I just can't figure out what was going so wrong. I mean, obviously I was not following the chart properly, but what's so frustrating is, I thought I was - I was being extra careful, and still screwing it up. And it was always in the same place - Row 38. That's what did me in on my first attempt. (I did check the designer's errata page, just in case - no, it's me).

Apparently the only way I could properly knit lace would be in some type of isolation chamber with absolutely no distractions. But I'm not even sure that would work - it was pretty quiet and non-distracting out on the porch last night.

It's even more disappointing because I just ordered $30 more of the Silky Lace Alpaca, to ensure I had enough to make the shawl (since I'd changed needle size from the original pattern).

I'm thinking about making a light summer cardigan. I wear this one sweater almost year-round, but it's kind of heavy for summer. I thought I'd make something out of a nice sport-weight cotton, and not try to follow a manufactured pattern (as I've never yet had one of those work out either). I thought I'd try my "Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns." You determine your own gauge, then follow a chart-like description of what to knit where, to make a simple sweater (or cardigan). Since row gauge doesn't enter into it, everything lengthwise is done by measuring. Which would work great for me, because row gauge is another place I often get myself into trouble.

I've made two vests from this book, both for my dad. The first one turned out pretty nice. The second one turned out beautiful but way too big - but that was my fault for - again - having a gauge problem. I've been wanting to knit myself a sweater for a long time, but my first two attempts were disastrous (one was ripped out, the other is laying in the back of my closet) - both because of gauge issues.

Geez, it sounds like I don't know how to knit at all. To boost my ego, I'll remind you of this - all of which fit, by the way!

Anyway, back to the discussion at hand: the sweater designs in "Handy Book of Sweater Patterns" are simple and plain, in part because that would be the only way to make a book like this, covering so many sizes and gauges, and in part because it's ideal for adding your own patterning to cutomize it for yourself. It's more of a recipe than a pattern. And one lesson I think I have learned - it takes me a far larger piece of knitting than a 6x6 swatch to get a true gauge calculation. When I knit something larger, like a sweater, my gauge always changes as I get further into it and the piece gets bigger. (it doesn't keep on changing indefinitely - at some point, far into the project, it stabilizes - but it's usually quite a ways into it, like half the back of a sweater).

So where all this is going is, my thought is that when the new lace yarn shows up, I'll just return it and exchange it for some cotton yarn. Then I'll knit an actual, very large gauge swatch - like the size of a sweater back. That way I can get a very accurate gauge, and I can experiment with different pattern stitches I might want to try in the sweater, taking the gauge of those sections as well.

If I do all that, I think I have a chance of making a sweater that I have partially designed, that I like, that fits.

Maybe. I thought I could get the lace to work, too.

Although I'll tell you something ... I'm really ticked off about the lace not working out, and I'm not sure I've given up on it yet. I may - may - try it again. I'd only be able to work on it in certain places and times, when I knew I could give it 120% of my attention, but ... I think I want to try it one more time. I hate being bested by some string and sticks.

Addendum: Okay, now I feel really stupid. I just went and did an internet search to see if I could find a knitalong for this shawl, or some posts on one of the Yahoo knitting groups, to see if anyone else was having trouble with this pattern. Au contraire, this is known to be one of the best 'beginner' patterns for lace because it's so "easy." Lovely.

Disaster ... faced and averted

I spoke too soon and too smugly about not having made any mistakes in the lace so far. (Yeah, ya'll probably saw that coming). Last night I had a minor disaster. I was two stitches short in the row I was working, in two different pattern repeats. The first time it happened, I just fluffed some fix (probably an M1 [make one], I don't remember now) and went on. But when I discovered the second mistake in the end of the same row, I didn't want to leave them both. My experience with the first attempt is that once that happens, it just goes downhill from there.

So I decided I was going to unknit this row and fix it. And that's when the real crisis ensued. I was just having a very hard time properly unknitting that row. Several times I thought I'd dropped stitches that might be yarn-overs, but wasn't sure. Several times I ended up with two loops instead of one where one stitch should be, and wasn't sure what I did.

In my defense, I was extraordinarily tired last night, and probably shouldn't have been even trying to fix it. I finally gave up, left it in it's disastrous state and went to bed, assuming that today I'd have to bite the bullet and rip it all out.

Oh, what a difference a good night's sleep and daylight can bring. This morning I tackled it again, but all the things that made no sense to me last night started making sense this morning. I realized that my previous row was a purl row on the wrong side, which means that I should be ripping back to solid stitches, no yarn-overs. So I didn't have to worry about them.

I also got smart and began really studying the stitches, not just counting. I finally began to be able to recognize stitches just by looking at them ("this is a knit 2 together, so when I unknit it, I should have two loops on the left needle instead of one"), and distinguish where problems were - to 'read the knitting' as they say, a skill that has to date eluded me with lacy stuff. I can do that in my knitting with larger yarns (even socks), but once you get into tiny stitches and the laciness of yarn-overs and such, I was getting very confused.

I unknit the entire row, then went back through comparing it with the chart, and figuring out which stitches were in fact still there, and which ones were missing. I'm no expert at it yet, but it all began to make sense, and I was able to isolate the problems.

It turned out that whole disaster occurred because I'd missed two yarnovers in the previous pattern row. That was it. Just forgot to make a couple yarnovers. That seems to be a bad habit of mine.


I 'fixed it' - so to speak. I was able to reknit the row, picking up yarn from the row below to 'create' the missing yarnovers. It's obviously not a perfect fix. The missing yarn-over should have been two rows below, then purled on the previous wrong-side row, making the large 'hole' that creates the lacy effect; picking up a horizontal bar from only one row below to replace it only fixes my stitch count as a mostly solid stitch, losing that particular lace 'hole' for that row.

But I got my stitch count back on track, everything in the right place, and I don't believe those missed yarn-over fixes will have a totally catastrophic impact on the final result (as long as I don't keep on doing it). It will show if looked for, but if I can stay more or less on track through the rest of it, I don't think they're going to be very noticeable in the greater scheme of things.

Once I got it fixed this morning, I set it aside. I'm not going back to work on it till tonight, because I think I learned my lesson ... I think I'm going to run a lifeline this time. Although I think getting tiny lace stitches back on the needle even with a lifeline could be a huge headache, I still think it would better than getting two feet into this thing and then having something disastrous happen that causes me to have to rip the whole thing out. That would just make me suicidal. (hence the term lifeline, I suppose).

So. No more cockiness with lace. (Although I was proud of myself for fixing it). Tonight, life line, then more knitting. (although probably not much - Ghost Hunters is on, and I love that show, and I've learned I really can't knit lace while watching an engaging TV show that I actually want to see, not just listen to). And I'm going to pay much more attention from here on out. Because really - I don't mind having the occasional mistake in a piece of knitting that only 'sorta' gets fixed, but when it's lace, I don't want to just keep screwing up over and over - enough of those will ruin the design, which is the point of knitting lace; if I'm going to tackle this stuff, I want to do a better job than that.

Okay, this rocks!

This is going much better since I dropped to a size 2 needle!



(Sorry for the rather crappy picture; I didn't want to take the time to go actually pin it out on a better background. Maybe when there's a little more of it done, I will get a better picture.)

So whatever the confusion with the pattern is, I'm sticking with what works for me. (Note to self - go order more yarn!).

The pattern is coming out much more clearly to me in this version, but more importantly for the short-term, it's so much easier to knit. I am up to row 28 - 2/3 of the length I got last time - and haven't had a single mistake. (knocking on wood)

I think the lack of mistakes is due to the fact that I can see what I'm doing so much better, and the whole pattern makes so much more sense now. I was even able to work on it a little bit last night while watching TV, something I never thought I'd be able to do. Granted, when it got to the interesting parts in the show, I did Put. The knitting. Down.

But anyway, I'm happy - and becoming very addicted to lace knitting.