While waiting to start the sweater for NaKniSweMo, I cast on another sock.  It’s something small to pass the time.  I’m working on the Mad Color Weave sock using Socks that Rock in the colorway In the Navy. 

 

So far, the pattern is moving along quickly.  I’m already up to the heel flap on the first sock.  I decided to go with 10 repeats of the pattern on the leg instead of 6, because I like a longer sock, and I think I should have enough yarn.  Overall, it is a very detailed written pattern, six pages including a chart. 

I’ve never been much of a joiner when it comes to knitalongs (Bayerische excluded).  But, I’ve joined one.

 

In November, I’ll be participating in the NaKniSweMo (National Knitting Sweater Month).  The goal is to knit a 50,000 stitch sweater in one month.  I assume that 50,000 stitch sweater = 1 adult sized sweater.   I’ll be waiting to start the Phyllo Yoked Sweater until November 1.  Now I have to find a sock or other small project to keep me busy for the next week.

You can participate too, by signing up at Knitgrrl’s blog or join the Ravelry group.

While I was fairly certain the yarn was doomed, I decided that the yarn deserved some sort of test before I tossed it out.  I wasn’t sure I had it in me to face knitting with it.  Instead, I decided to rewind the yarn with the ball winder.  It would put some stress on the yarn, but it would not normally be enough to break it.

As I wound the first ball of yarn, I made it nearly halfway through before the snapped.  I stopped, pulled the ball off the winder and started again.  I made it all the way through without any more yarn breaking.  Perhaps, I thought to myself, the yarn will be ok after all.  Not wanting to judge by just this ball, I decided to wind a few more. 

On the second ball, the yarn snapped very soon into winding the ball.  I continued as before, removing the yarn from the winder and starting a new ball.  In the end, this ball of yarn snapped four times.  But, I’d decided to test three balls.  As I picked up the last ball of yarn, deep down in my heart, I already knew that it was doomed.  When the yarn snapped early in the winding, I gave it.  It just wasn’t worth it.  The yarn has been tossed.

I sulked for about a day.  I just couldn’t believe that the yarn I wanted to use was such a disaster.  After that, it was back to stash research to see if anything else would work for this sweater.  I’d really become set on knitting this project.  There were two remaining stash yarns that would work, based upon gauge and yardage.  First up was the Jaeger Luxury Tweed, pictured below.

I was a bit concerned about the marled color of the yarn.  Would it overwhelm the patterning in the sweater?  I wasn’t sold on the fact that this was the appropriate yarn for the pattern.  The other yarn that fit based upon weight and yardage was the Baruffa Merinos Sei.  This is a yarn I purchased in April.  It’s a beautiful, smooshy, super-soft wool.  I thought that it would be much more appropriate for the pattern. 

I cast on for the swatches.  For some reason, this has been very slow knitting.  I began knitting the first swatch using my Addis at KTog on Thursday night.  The swatch didn’t get finished there because I spend too much time looking at other projects and yarns (and talking).  I finally finished it Saturday night, and noticed that the gauge was off.  I decided to knit additional swatches with other needles. 

Last night, while watching baseball, I finished the additional two swatches using both my bamboo and Denise needles.  I washed the three swatches, and they’re currently drying on a towel.  With all of the problems that I’ve had to date, I’m not willing to risk a post-blocking gauge change that causes the sweater not to fit.  By tonight, the swatches should be dry, and I can measure the post-blocking gauge.

Since my last post, there has been swatching.  I determined that my stashed yarn was suitable for this pattern.  Before we go on, I’ll give you some background on this yarn.

The yarn selected for the sweater is Phildar Detente.  It’s an older yarn that I got at a garage sale last year.  As a knitter, this was a fabulous sale.  As I’d heard from Vanessa, the mother of the person having the sale used to own a yarn shop.  All the shop remains were in boxes in the garage.  The woman actually let me go into the garage and dig through boxes to find yarn.  I filled a box full of Phildar cotton yarns, Anny Blatt Angora, Ironstone Mohair, Brown Sheep Top of the Lamb…the list goes on (and I didn’t even get time to dig in the boxes marked superwash).  As I left the garage sale, the woman charged me $10 for the entire box.  I almost felt guilty walking away with such a large quantity of yarn for such a small price. 

Based upon that history, I’m not sure that this yarn has been stored in optimal condition over the years.  But, it doesn’t smell or seem discolored, so I wasn’t worried about it.  I wasn’t worried, that is, until I swatched.

Perhaps it’s one of those little things that we, as knitters, try to convince ourselves won’t matter.  You know what I mean, those issues during a project that we somehow always seem to rationalize.  Not getting gauge?  Don’t worry, it’ll block to the right size.  Yarn running low?  I’m sure there’s enough, if not, I’m sure the different dye lots won’t be noticeable.  There are lots of these things on projects where we convince ourselves to ignore the obvious problem.

With my swatch, it was the yarn breakage.  I knit my stockinette swatch to measure my gauge, and then I decided to swatch the lace pattern from the yoke to see how it looked.  Several rows in, the yarn broke as I put my needle into a stitch for a K2Tog.  Surely, just a fluke occurrence.  The yarn met the necessary gauge, so I cast on a sleeve and started to knit.

About an inch in, the yarn snapped again.  Since I’d started with the remainder of the ball from swatching, I decided that I was still too near the original break, and must be at a weak point of the yarn.   I kept knitting.  Several more inches in, the yarn snapped again.  Each time I undid some knitting so that I could start the new yarn.  Somehow I managed to convince myself not to worry.  This evening, everything changed.  What happened?  This happened.

It’s a hole.  Several inches back in the sleeve.  Somehow the simple motion of flipping the knitted piece back and forth managed to cause enough wear to break the yarn.  So now I’m left with a problem.  All of the knitting so far has been from the same ball of yarn.  Am I foolish enough to think that this is only a problem with this ball and all others will be fine?  Do I spend the time to redo all of my work starting with another ball of yarn (and if so, do I have enough for the sweater)?  Do I just toss the yarn and go back to the drawing board to find a new project?

I’m leaning towards tossing the yarn and heading back to the drawing board.  I just have too much fear that the rest of the yarn will be the same.  Even if it doesn’t break, if knitting is enough wear on the fabric to cause holes, it will only last on me for about five minutes before it falls apart.  Or, perhaps I’m overreacting to the whole situation.  Any ideas out there?

I’m not sure what it has been lately, but I’ve been feeling so uninspired to knit. I’ve actually been feeling this way for quite some time, but the knitalong for Bayerische and the overdue baby sweater gave me projects that I didn’t need to seek inspiration for. The following story summarizes my last two weeks of knitting.

The only project that I’ve really been working on is a pair of socks that I’m designing. It progressed like this. Produce chart on paper to match design vision. Cast on and knit 4-6 inches of leg. Examine sock, maybe even try it on. Hate everything about the pattern or fabric or the way the color pooled. Frog the project. Let the project stew for a few days. Modify the chart and start over again. I’d been through this cycle about six times, but I just couldn’t produce something I liked. (The good news is that for all of this knitting and ripping, the yarn still looks good.)

Convinced that it was just my lack of pattern design originality that was causing this non-knitting mood, I decided to cast on a pattern from a book. I started knitting Spey Valley from Nancy Bush’s Knitting on the Road, but gave up on it after I finished the ribbed cuff. I ripped out the knitting and put the book back on the shelf.

I still felt that there had to be something out there for me, so I went seeking inspiration. I decided to see what others were working on. I searched around the knitting blog ring for so long that I’ve seen many blogs more than once (and sent so many broken/not found sites to the admins that I’m sure they’re annoyed). I spent time on Ravelry. I still felt at a loss for project ideas.

Since starting with a pattern was not getting me anywhere, I decided to try and finish photographing all of my stash for Ravelry. Perhaps if I could sit and look at photos of it all at once, I’d feel a bit more inspiration. I dug the stash out of the cedar trunk on Monday night, just in time for my husband to walk in and see it scattered everywhere. I managed to progress to the point that only about 1/3 of my stash that is in Ravelry is without a photo, but there’s still more stash not in Ravelry yet. By this point, my patience for finding sources of inspiration was wearing thin. Touching and photographing the stash wasn’t working. There had to be another way.

My next idea was to “give back” to the community. I’ve been a volunteer editor at Ravelry, but I decided that instead of waiting for people to put patterns from those back issues of Interweave in for me to edit, I’d start entering the patterns. First, I went and checked my editing queue, and cleaned up the three or four patterns that needed approval. Then, I started entering patterns. Between the cleanup and additions, I quickly grew tired of my pattern work (although people have already added some of these patterns to their queue).

Somehow, it finally dawned on me, the reason I couldn’t seem to focus on a knit project was related my uncertainty about how to approach my stash. I was torn between casting on for a single, large lace project (large yardage, small mass) and a smaller project with larger needles (less yardage, larger mass). Which was more important, mass or yardage?

I think this may have been triggered by my recent trip to Oregon, and lots of talk of moving. For right now, I feel that I need to make an effort to reduce the mass, and not be as concerned with yardage in the stash. If a cross-country move is to take place next year, I must be prepared to deal with all my yarn.

So, with that realization, I spent this morning (very early, before dawn) surfing through my books on Ravelry. I stumbled upon this, the Phyllo Yoked Pullover from Knitting Nature.

I posted about this sweater back when I got the book in June, but somehow I’d forgotten about it. Since I was already on Ravelry, I hopped over to my stash page. Turns out that there may just be some stash yarn that will knit to gauge, with adequate yardage. Swatching commences soon. Look out knitting, here I come.