DesigKnit

Blocking on the needles feels a little like opening presents early, doesn’t it? Even if it is a very casual blocking, laying the lace out really does help to see how the patterns are working together.

You’ll note that the purl columns are now hardly visible from a distance, though you can still see them a little bit if you look from an angle.

That abrupt transition is not as noticeable, and the patterns merge into one another nicely, though there’s still a tiny hiccup where the diamonds change into the pendant lace.

And, as usual, the lace has changed from a shapeless blob into something light and airy.

I’m still pondering whether to rip back and fix the transition now, or whether to leave it and worry about perfecting the charts in the second half, but at least I’m not ripping all the way back to the cast-on! Thank goodness for blocking.

The shawl has been progressing nicely after last week’s repairs. I’ve transitioned into the third stitch pattern, and am coming close to finishing the first half.

Except that I’m not sure I like it. I really like the transition from vines to block lace, and even the transition to the pendant lace is working pretty well. But I really don’t like those purl ribs, or how they end abruptly at the beginning of the pendant lace. They were fine in the swatch, but they establish a lot more visual continuity in the real piece, and their abrupt end is bothering me.

I’m also worried that I’m going to run out of yarn.

I’m only two repeats into the center section, and I’m really just not sure that I’m going to make it another three. This is 437 yards of yarn in one half of the shawl, and I’m running out!

I knew that the solid lace would eat yarn, but I thought I’d be ok, since I was starting out with almost 900 yards for a shawl. Well, now I’m starting to think that I won’t make it. If I pull back, I can decrease the number of repeats in the vine lace and get back more yardage for the openwork. I could also eliminate some of the extra width in the border, and remove those rib columns. But that would mean tweaking the design and starting completely over. Or, I could pull back to the end of the rib columns and figure out something interesting to do with them, rather than just cutting them off at the transition. This would save on the ripping back, but wouldn’t get me any more yarn, and I’m quite frankly stumped on how to make those look any better.

The jury is still out, but right now I’m not so sure it’s working. I’m going to block this half on the needles and see how it turns out before doing anything too drastic. Fingers crossed that blocking does the trick!

I never begin a project expecting to fail. There are some cases, though, where I know I’m taking a calculated risk.

With the sock surgery, I knew that it could end up being impossible to graft the two halves back together, and that I might have to reknit the heel. Since I’d have to do that either way, I figured that it was worth it to try a new technique, at the possible cost of an extra end to weave in and a few hours of poking around with the grafting.

Knowledge of this risk might be why I am so inordinately pleased that it worked. I didn’t expect it to fail, but I’d have put the odds at a little better than 50/50 that it would work out.

I started out with simple grafting. I put the yarn through two of the live stitches on the needle.

Then, I passed it through one leg of each stitch on the first row of the heel section.

I left the stitches loose until I had done quite a few in a row, then went back and tightened them up.

This gave me a join that was offset by half a stitch.

I thought I might be able to do better than that. So, instead of passing the needle through the legs of two stitches, I passed it behind both legs of a single stitch.

Which makes much more sense, really, because this is what the yarn was doing in the row that I pulled out to split the two halves of the sock; one loop wrapping around the two legs of the stitch in the next row. This gave me a much better join.

Honestly, I’m not sure that I could even point out which row was grafted, without examining very, very closely.

For a surgery with 50/50 chances, I’d say it turned out pretty well.

This week, two projects have needed minor surgery.

I knit a lot on the shawl last weekend, and was making good progress. Just as I put it down on Sunday night, though, I noticed this:

Do you see that? In the diamond column? Two pairs of little diamonds that got joined at the point (in both columns). I wasn’t going to rip all the way back for those, but I also wasn’t going to leave them there. So, that became this:

And then was carefully worked back up to the needles. The patient healed well, and is showing no permanent scarring. In fact, she’s even progressing rather nicely after her surgery.

The second patient was a slightly more subtle case. I finished the second sock that’s been my bus knitting lately:

As you can see, the second sock is a little bit shorter than the first. Careful counting verified that all of my stitch counts were correct, but that I had somehow increased once every 2 rows for the second sock and once every 3 rows for the first while making the arch expansion (this is the disadvantage of bus knitting…much easier to miss important instructions in my notes!). The second sock still fits, but it’s a bit tight at the toes and just doesn’t fit as well in the arch area.

I didn’t really want to pull the whole thing back and re-knit it, but I also want a sock that I will wear. So, I took this opportunity to practice a technique that I have seen but have never tried myself. First, I cut one tiny little stitch.

Then, I began to unpick the row that it belongs to:

This gave me two halves of a sock; the heel and cuff, and the toe-arch section.

I pulled back the offending increases, and picked up the stitches to rework them.

And now I have bus knitting for tomorrow.

I’m happy to report that both surgeries went well, and the patients are well on their way to a speedy recovery. I’ll keep you updated on their convalescence.

I’m not usually much of a product knitter. I don’t mind projects that go on (and on) for months at a time. I like sinking into one thing and working my way, stitch by stitch, through from beginning to end.

Sometimes, though, it’s good to see some progress. It may be because I don’t feel like there’s been a lot of progress happening at work lately, or it may be for some other completely random and unfathomable reason, but right now I really want to see things move.

Fast.

Go! Go!

I’m not sure that that this week was a success in that regard, but things have progressed a little since last we spoke.

I pinned the stole out this time, partly so that you can see the pattern and partly because it makes it look just a leettle bit bigger.

This project has taken a long time to get off the ground. I’ve been tweaking my design process lately, and the current method puts a lot of the planning at the beginning before the knitting begins (this will generally be a very good thing, but it’s also a pretty big change, since I generally like to feel my way through a design rather than planning out every last thing). Then we found out that I was knitting it with the wrong yarn, and then the wrong needles. Fussing here and there.

But I think we have it now. The fabric is pretty dense for lace, but I like the visual weight of it. The yarn (Misti Alpaca) is fine enough that it is very light despite the stockinette base. I like how the three stitch patterns are working together, even if they do have different and non-compatible row counts so that each row is unique (they’re easy enough to memorize, so there’s not much need for charts except as a reference after the first few repeats). I love the color, and it’s working much, much better with the pattern. And the needles sing. I love Addi lace.

So. A few inches, but really quite a bit of progress.

Now, I wonder how far I can go before switching to the next stitch pattern?