Monday, November 21, 2005

Weekend Knitting Mayhem (or Why I Should Follow My Own Directives)

Today I:
  • had plain bagel with Tofutti "cream cheese" and nutritional yeast
  • drank a cup of organic Fair Trade coffee with vanilla soy milk
  • made myself a soy latte at work
  • reverted to bruchetta pizza and Kettle chips for lunch
  • had yet another coffee... from a box of coffee...

Whereas, yesterday I:

  • had an egg salad sandwich and a large latte for breakfast
  • had the last of the vegetable-noodle soup for dinner
  • ripped out close to 3,000 stitches
  • finished it all off with a beer and a hot buttered rum, and really, who could blame me?

Saturday began innocuously enough: I slept in, had soy lattes with Joe at his work, then made my weekly sacrifice to Windsor Button, and settled in at a coffeehouse to start a hat for my dad for X-mas.

Originally, my dad's hat was going to be Fair Isle. Then, what with the holiday knitting taking so long (I have 8 or 9 siblings), and my mom's socks being such a challenge (why didn't I just stockinette stitch some self-striping yarn? What was I thinking doing an openwork design?) I decided it might be prudent to nix that program and just make something classic and functional, like a seaman's hat. I found a good pattern, bought some black Lion Wool (cheap person that I am) and set to it. Two and half hours of coffee-drinking and some nachos and a couple DVDs later I had a hat. So easy! I just followed the instructions and all the faults were mine. (Luckily, they're minor.)

Side View

This hat is not purple - it's BLACK. It is very difficult to photograph black F.O.s at night in and dinky little apartment, especially when your model is determined to make monkey faces. I managed to edit most of that out, but I can do nothing whatsoever about the color.

Front View

I am rather pleased with the Seaman's Hat. I was going to make the Marsan Watchcap, (such a nice spiral decrease!) but in the photos it looked perhaps a little too loosely knit. My dad works in building maintenance and needs something suitable for wear in extremely foggy/damp weather. This seaman's hat pattern looked snugly knit, and as it turns out, has some very nice details, such as a continuation of the cuff ribbing on the underside and m1 twisted increases. I think I am going to make more, even though that may mean bestowing gifts upon those outside of the nuclear family. Maybe Bob. (Bob recently reported actually enjoying the fingerless gloves I mailed him.)

Which brings me to the serious act of frogging that was committed last tonight, grinding all knitting for the evening to a tragic halt.

It's the fingerless gloves with the mitten flip-tops that I'm making for Sibling #8. I started with the Broad Street Mittens from Knitty, but certain untoward reports about the shaping of the palm led me to actually seeing a couple pairs of them in person, confirming my growing suspicion of the pattern. I had learned (or so I thought) from making those fingerless gloves from Rowan #36 that I could not trust glove patterns to be sized properly - gloves that were supposed to fit the average-sized female hand, and were slightly downsized by me, are now being enjoyed by an averaged-sized man with notably wide palms.

What to do?

Well, after vowing to never faithfully follow a pattern again, I used the Knitting Fiend glove pattern generator to make my own. (I can trust the Knitting Fiend, right?)

As it turns out, not really. I entered my gauge, selected hand type "small", then printed out the directions and followed them. Nearly faithfully. This is what I had when it came time to make the fingers. Now, I know this is a blurry photograph, but I bet you an still see my problem quite clearly: THIS GLOVE IS FAR TOO BIG.

The gauge was correct. The problem, I surmise, is the idea of "small". Apparently, I am "extra small". Possibly even "extra extra small" or "itsy-bitsy".

I frogged down to the cuff and wrote home to Sibling #8 asking for exact measurements of her hands. I'll just start it from scratch. Again.

3 comments:

bitterknitter said...

Your hat turned out great! The whole sizing thing with gloves has convinced me that I will not be making any this winter anyway. Maybe next winter!

fiberfanatic said...

hugs, sometimes our gauge swatches can be looser than our actual knitting. Check your knitting as you go along and see what the gauge is turning out to become. Happens to me all the time, darn it!

Unknown said...

Could be... Though it's too late to tell now.