Over the Hump!

In every project, it seems, there is a point where I just cannot proceed right away. The pattern changes, the sleeves have to get attached, etcetera, etcetera, and somehow I need to grow some courage to continue. Well I grew my courage on my cardigan and started the cable pattern. I, of course, already messed up the second row of the cable chart and had to take it out, but it has been started and the roadblock is gone.

 Sometimes, I think, life is like knitting in this way. We need a little rest time to grow some courage to make changes. It's hard to find the energy to change when we are keeping up the hectic pace that so many of us are accustomed to. It's difficult to even know what we want our change to be when there is hardly time to think about the mundane everyday questions and certainly not the grand how-do-you-want-your-life-to-be kinds of questions.

 People ask me what I want and, unless it's in reference to lunch or dinner (bbq sandwiches, pizza) my answer is invariably "I don't know." I kind of know what I don't want but I'm not entirely sure of what I want. And what if what I want turns out to be crap and I don't really want it? I guess these are eternal questions. Maybe you solve them before you die and that's when you know your time is up. Luckily I think I've got a long time before I get anywhere so the world is stuck with me for a while.

Absent but coming back

I've been absent lately from my creative endeavors but I'm on my way back.

First I was in a slump, uninspired and unmotivated then I caught some very infectious daycare germs and was flattened by illness, then I couldn't find my knitting tools and was forced to do nothing.

But now those problems seemed to have resolved themselves. I found my tools, row counter being the most important and easiest to lose, so I can continue on the yoke of my cardigan (btw the sleeves are very much the same size), plus the needles and yarn I was missing to work on a new little toy I'm making for...me probably. The toy has got me working and thinking again about fun things to make and I'm recovering nicely from my illness.

I've still got some problems: a lingering cough, some extra snot in my nose, no buttons for my other cardigan, behind on my master knitter swatches, not much time to knit (or write, or think, or shower). Despite those though, I think I'm on the mend; coming back from my late-winter blahs and starting to feel like the world is turning right side up again. As Martha S. says, it's a good thing.

Creative Slump

I'm in a creative slump right now. Totally uninspired. I have no writing ideas, no knitting ideas and am totally blank. This sucks. I don't even want to do fun stuff around the house like baking.

Maybe I just need more rest, or more time, or both...Blah. This will pass and I will get my mojo back. It just might take a while.

Buttons

The buttons are killing me! Well, not really but they are a problem.

I finished my Meringue Yoke Cardigan and now I need to put on the buttons. My problem is, what buttons? Buttons are an important choice. I want them to be noticeably gorgeous but not take away from the beauty of the sweater. I want them to stand out, but not too much. Plus they have to fit through the buttonholes.

I went to the store and bought some bone colored interesting rectangularish-ovalish ones that I thought would be pretty on it but two things happened and I decided not to use them. The first being that I lost one, which is not a total tragedy since the sweater doesn't have specific buttonholes (the placket is made of garter stitch with one row of yarn-overs, yes, it's a very wonderfully forgiving sweater to make) and I could probably make do with one less button. But, the second thing that happened was that I looked at the buttons laid out on the sweater and decided I didn't like them. They seemed too big for the sweater and the white did not accentuate the teal like I imagined it would, it simply looked clowny and kind of garish. Sad.

So, I'm back to square one. What buttons? At least I know white-bone colored ones are out, but that leaves me to decide between, wood, metal, horn, plastic, polymer clay (not likely) and the myriad of other materials that people make buttons from. Crap.

Sleeeeves

Here's what happens when you knit by the seat of your pants, don't take notes and make two items that need to be exactly alike at very different times from one another:

What's that you say? That my friend, is a giant ball of re-do, aka try-again, aka knit-it-over. Or you could just call it, I messed up so bad there's no fixing it.

This is a once and future sleeve. I made two sleeves for my beautiful Twisted Yoke Cardigan and when I got to the end of the second one I realized that it was about an inch and a half longer than the first one. Oooops! When I went back to diagnose my problem I found that I had put the decreases in at too short an interval on the first one. Both sleeves followed the pattern but one was knit a size smaller than the other one. Apparently I couldn't remember what size I was working on when I started the first sleeve, or I just simply thought I was making a different size than I really was. Why didn't I write anything down when I started the sweater?? It's because I think my memory is infallible, but unfortunately it is not. And I had proof in my two different sized sleeves.

At first I thought I could make up for it by knitting on to the end of the first one but then I realized that the sleeve would be oddly shaped no matter what I did and they would never match. Maybe it would look funny and maybe it wouldn't but I don't care to find out so I ripped. I ripped both of them. I have a little remorse about ripping the one that was probably right but I was so rattled by the discrepancy in length that I don't want to chance it. These will be exactly the same! At least the pattern for the sleeves is simple and doesn't take too long to knit. Stupid sleeves.

Hopefully (but I doubt it) I have learned my lesson and will take very detailed notes in future. At least write down what size I'm making. That's pretty simple right? I can do that.

Decrease Evenly

I've been working on the Meringue Yoke Cardigan from Interweave Knits and I finally reached the yoke decreases only to find that the pattern stated simply decrease x number of stitches evenly. Whahaaa?! That's annoying. I like the pattern tell me how to make the sweater. Like it's supposed to. Not, "here do some math." So I tried to divide the decreases by the number of stitches but that number is not accurate since each decrease takes two stiches and I want one at each edge. I found I would reach the end of the rows with either not enough decreases or too many to fit on the row. Very irksome.

I thought long and hard about this problem and decided to search the internet because it is all knowing, well sort of. Someone else must have encountered this same problem before and come up with a viable solution and it's likely that they posted it.

The first thing I came across was from the author of the pattern and involved doing long division by hand. To me it didn't look mathematically plausible and anything that involves arithmetic without a calculator is just silly, so I kept looking.

I then came upon this lady's page! She uses real math! SCIENCE! EQUATIONS! They're great. I tried this formula and it worked. Simple, easy, calculator friendly. Maybe I should send it to the pattern author. :)

Others

So I've been looking for a compilation of inspiring and helpful websites to inspire and help me with my knitting. I'm not a patient woman and I cannot sort through myriads of crap (meaning chat threads, and layer up on layer of BLAH!) that exist in websites that may have this information. Thus, I have not been able to find the helpful and inspiring index I'm looking for.

Since I can't find it I must create it, and I plan to do that here. Look for links under Inspiration and Help.