Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The Only Solution

This may come as a shock to many of you, but, well…. I can be a bit of a smart ass (I swear, I can actually HEAR my father laughing out loud right now).  Yes, it's true.  I have been known, at times, to display a fair bit of the smug.  Really.  You’d be surprised at how often I suppress the urge to let out a loud and heartfelt  “Well, DUH!”.

HAVING SAID THAT.

As you may or may not recall (see how I did that?  Just completely glossed over the fact that I haven’t blogged in just shy of a month.  Ahem.), a few weeks ago, I joined Stephen West’s Mystery KAL.  I have plenty of sock yarn, and I do so love his designs, I figured this would be great fun.  I didn’t bother  to knit a gauge swatch thought because, duh.  It’s a shawl, people.  I’m pretty sure it’s going to fit your basic human shaped person, right?  Nor did I concern myself too much with the fact that the yarn I had selected fell slightly short of the recommended yarns in the pattern because, duh-huuuuh.  Everyone knows projects rarely require ALL the yardage that’s stated in the pattern.  That’s just the designers’ way of messing with you covering their bases.

[The astute reader will at this point have noticed that, despite FULL knowledge of established Knitter Wisdom, this knitter flew RIGHT IN THE FACE of tested and true traditions and cast on without a care in the world.]

Everything was going swimmingly.  I was enjoying myself, and for ONCE, was actually up to date with the clues as they were coming out.  The first 3 clues were charming, and I was really looking forward to the final clue coming out and having a completed project to share with my awesome and loyal blog readers (see what I did again?)

The final clue has you knitting the edges of the shawl, decreasing from 83 stitches down to 9 at a rate of 2 stitches every 8 rows.  Yeah, I know it's a bit technical.  Anyway, the point is that there I was, happily knitting away, when it occurred to me that this last clue was somewhat knit heavy, and that my 2 balls of yarn were feeling, shall we say.... a little less than full?  I started to think that I might maybe perhaps run out of yarn.

Total and utter shock, people.  No idea how it could have happened.

This is hand dyed yarn, there's no way I can get any more.  What to do?  At first, I did what we all tend to do when we suspect we're going to run out of yarn: I knit faster.  When that proved ineffective (as it often does), I decided there was nothing for it but to rip back to the beginning of the final clue and increase the rate of the decreases (from 2 stitches per repeat to 4.  That would definitely work, but after about 5 pattern repeats, I started to feel like the edges of my shawl were looking a little too stumpy, and that maybe I should go back to the original decrease rate of 2 stitches every 8 rows.

Now I'm about to finish the first edge, and the balls of yarn that were disappearing faster than a teenager asked to empty the dishwasher appear to have as much yardage in them as they did when I first cast on.  I think they may even have MORE yarn in them than when I ripped back.  Which is making me wonder if I would have had enough yarn after all, and maybe I should rip back AGAIN and knit it the way Stephen West intended.



You know what this means, right?  I mean... there's really only one option at this point.

I'm going to have to cast on a pair of socks.

Happy Knitting, Everyone!

5 comments:

Alrischa said...

LOL!

Anyway, I believe that "Cast on Socks" is also a tested and true knitting tradition. So you're good.

Izabelle said...

I always laugh out loud when I read your blog posts. I related too much to this one. Happy sock knitting!

Maryse said...

I hope the story ends well ;-) New socks? Sounds like a good plan!

Knit and Purl Mama said...

Socks sound lovely!

I think that's why I don't knit mystery knits... I wait til people have tested out patterns and I can see how much yarn they actually used in their finished project, AND erratas have been fixed.

Celia said...

I'm sorry that didn't work out the way you wanted, but I'm sure the socks will turn out lovely.