The socks were finished on Tuesday, although I don’t have pictures yet. I had to take the van into the shop Thursday morning so I went stashdiving Wednesday night to figure out what project I was going to take with me. The winner was:

http://www.heartstringsfiberarts.com/h45.shtm

I actually had the yarn called for on hand already, so I pulled out the instructions to see if there was anything I needed to do ahead of time before Thursday morning. The first discovery was that it called for a crochet cast on, which was new for me. I did a quick search on the internet, found some instructions, and did the entire 300 stitch cast on Wednesday night. Then I confused myself as to whether or not a ROUND was the same as a ROW in the instructions. I finally decided they had to be the same based on how the instructions worked…or at least I decided that was how I was going to start it off anyway. I was good to go for Thursday.

Thursday morning at the dealership (where I expected to be until noon, and I didn’t bother to bring anything else to work on with me) started with problems almost immediately. It was a new set of circular needles, and they wanted to coil so much I was never certain that I hadn’t twisted the stitches when I did the initial join. I tried checking it a half dozen time, resorted to asking the gentleman next to me to hold one end of the needle while I attempted to straighten everything, and still wasn’t certain it was right by the time I had made the first round. I continued gamely on and started the second row.

That’s when I was informed that the van was going to be staying in the shop overnight, so they were getting me a rental car (thankfully covered under our service agreement.) This meant I had a couple of hours to run errands that I hadn’t planned on being able to do.

I headed a couple of miles down the road and made my first stop…and stayed there, because I couldn’t get the key out of the ignition. I felt rather stupid calling the rental car company five minutes after I left asking for help, but I didn’t really have another option. Forty minutes later, they finally arrived, and immediately popped the key out of the ignition. Turns out you had to push the key inward to get it turned that last little bit to disengage. In the meantime, I had managed to *almost* finish the second row…and discovered that my stitch count was apparently off by one.

I frogged the entire thing the next day.

This time I was smarter about it all. I straightened the cables before I ever started casting on. Once I had the cast on completed again, I had Dave hold one end while I straighted all the stitches before joining the round. This was much easier, as the cables weren’t coiling around themselves while I was trying to do it.

I started knitting again this morning. I got to the end of the first row, and discovered that I’d apparently joined the round much more loosely than I’d realized or intended. I convinced myself that a) it was going to tighten up as I continued with the rows, or b) I was going to be able to live with it anyway.

Five rows later, the join wasn’t tightening up, and I apparently dropped a stitch in the pattern repeat immediately before the join. I attempted lace surgery to fix the dropped the stitch. I managed to wind up with the requisite number of stitches back on the needles, sans the gaping hole from the dropped stitch, although I’m certain it’s not exactly the correct pattern through that portion.

This still left me with the even larger gap from my inadequate join. I’d been watching that gap each row, loudly telling myself I could live with it in an attempt to drown out the voice in my head that said I really couldn’t live with it.

I have finally admitted defeat. I’m not going to be happy with that gap (it’s almost as large as an entire pattern section), and the portion directly in front it probably isn’t right anyway. I even asked Dave for his opinion and he immediately commented that it wasn’t something I’d be happy with.

I’ll be frogging it all again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll work on something else for a bit.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Irritations, Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.