When knitting ATTACKS!

I don't know if you know this, but we crafters make mistakes.  I know, shocking.

We make ghastly ones that cause tears and frustration, and the call of frogs can be heard over the sobs of knitters (rip it rip it rip it). We make small ones we keep in the knitting, either to remind us of our own mortality, or with the knowledge that if someone looks at object from 3 meters away while riding a horse they'll never see it in a million years.

If anyone points out we crossed a cable the wrong way, they're close enough to stab is all I'm saying.

And sometimes, it's not us.  It's the pattern or it's the yarn.

And sometimes it very much is us.

At the time of thinking about writing this post, I had two recent errors in mind to talk about.  But I found a third, ghastly error to talk about, so you get three for the price of two.

Last night I was merrily knitting on some self-striping socks for Hazel, my daughter, when I realized something was going wrong. And it wasn't me.  It was the yarn.

Can you spot the issue?

  I got the yarn from knit picks, and it is not very good, to be honest.  The shoddy dye job alone is enough to warn you away from buying the yarn, but the yarn itself is relatively inexpensive, and I like the quality of yarn (ply structure, softness, etc) compared to their other sock yarns.  And they're self striping, which is neat.  Usually the dye jobs are Much nicer.  Can't complain, really.

Till last night.

See, I don't know if you notice from that picture, but even the cast on is matching. I pulled an entire stripe out of the second 50 gram skein I bought so that I would be sure that the socks would line up: green, pink, orange. I did everything I could to make sure the socks would match *perfectly.*

 They wound the yarn on the second 50 grams skein backwards!

 The nerve!

 That's really all I have to say about it, I'm not ripping back, it's fine.  Back of a horse and all that.

 --

The second grievous error was the fault of the pattern.

 

This looks alright, really.  Where's the problem, I can hear you ask?

The colors are inverted.  What's yellow there should be gray.  I ripped them out and haven't quite gotten back to where I was.  I tried to nab a photo, but I'm not far enough in to show good details.

Why oh why would they be inverted?  Because the color work chart had the gray squares meant to be knit with yellow yarn and the white squares to be done with gray.  Gee, I wonder why I got confused.  I actually went to the computer and reprinted the charts with colors inverted and it's Much better now.

--

The third error is a massive cry-your-eyes out error that was essentially my own damn fault.

 Well, it was my fault the second time I knit the sweater.  The first time I knit the yoke, it was the designer's fault.

The third iteration of knitting the same sweater is going much better.

 I'll actually show you what I'm talking about.

Last spring I wanted to knit the Birkin sweater.  It's a beautiful colorwork yoke sweater that I'm knitting out of Brooklyn Tweed yarn in their fingering woolen spun Targhee.  It's wooly and soft and wonderful.  And it looks great in colorwork:

 

See? beautiful!

But, there's a catch. The yoke has quite a few three-color rows.  Which, is generally fine.  But it wreaked havoc on my tension, and when I tried it on it was bad.  It simply didn't have enough room for my shoulders.  I went looking through people's notes for the project and realized it was a mess.  It simply wasn't designed to fit a human being.  I did wash the yoke and try it on again, I thought of it as a large swatch, and still it was not going to work.

I went back to the drawing board, bought a fill-in-your-own yoke pattern, and redrew the charts.  Ain't nobody got time for three-color rows:

Why yes, I knit the whole thing.  It's lovely, honestly.  I thought I'd be smart though.  I thought I'd adjust the pattern in a few ways, and it didn't work out at all the way I'd hoped it would fit.

It was loose in places and pulled in others.  To the frog pond it went and back to the drawing board I went.

I realized that maybe top-down color-work yoke sweaters don't work for me in principle.
 

I *really* wanted a color work yoke sweater though.

I decided to insert the chart into the top of a bottom-up raglan sweater.  So, in this case I do all the knitting of the sleeves and body up to the armpit, join it all together and do the raglan shaping down to the neckline. I'll insert the color work into the raglan area, and it'll kinda be right.

Not as elegant as a yoke, but much more suited to my body I think.

I hope.

my progress thus far

I'm following the raglan sweater in Ann Budd book of sweaters, which is an excellent pattern source for you rogue knitters out there.  It provides stitch counts for any number of gauges and all the major types of sweater: raglan, drop sleeve, saddle shoulder, etc.

Anyway, I have hope that it'll work out this time.

I have hope.

Wish me luck!

Thanks for reading!

patterns:

Brigitte's Garden socks by Natalie Sheldon knit out of Malabrigo sock and knit picks stroll

Birkin- Caitlin Hunter knit out of Brooklyn Tweed Loft

The vanilla socks at the beginning are my own recipe.  If you want details about it, comment below and I'll give you numbers. I knit them out of felici yarn.