I took one of my two current projects with me to Jacksonville and worked on it v e r y slowly. It's an Aran sweater from the wrapper of Lion Brand Fishermen's wool. Aran sweaters originated in Irish fishing villages on the Aran islands, are traditionally made with virgin wool, and thus are good at resisting water (and smell like sheep!!!). Aran basically means a bunch of cables in a pattern. I read once that the cable patterns were inspired in part by the knots and ropes that the fishermen used. (Hm, maybe I could design a rock-climbing-knot Aran... Hee hee.) The point of the matter is that Aran sweaters are intricate and have lots of twisting, which makes them a little bit more difficult that your basic knit sweater. In my opinion, the difficulty of Aran sweaters is more a matter of patience than skill, although I suppose skill/technique would determine whether your cables looked even or all messed up. But then again, what does my opinion count - I've been knitting for less than two years, and this is my first cabled piece!
At any rate, my personal knitting of an Aran sweater is very slow-going, mostly because I don't work on it very often and there are a billion stitches in each row, and I have to think about what happens to each one of them individually. So it's quite frustrating when I'm sitting on the bus (where I do most of my knitting) on the ride into work and realize that I screwed up 2 stitches 6 rows back. This was the case on Thursday morning of this week.
What to do? My first instinct was to do what is called "frogging" where you weave the knitting needle into the stitches on the row before the messed up one and then rip (get it? - "rip it" = "ribbit" = "frogging") out the stitches in the rows before by pulling on the yarn (reminds me of the Weezer song "Undone": "If you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away." Very depressing to think of destroying my very own I-made-it sweater...). However, I also knew that I had made a couple little tiny mistakes way back 16 rows before. 16 rows before was, basically, the start of the Aran pattern.
I decided that, if I had to rip, I might as well rip it all out and start over. Waaaaaah! Starting over has occured quite frequently for this particular sweater... I was not excited to do it once again.
But I did. And honestly, it was a good choice. First of all, now I don't have to live with the knowledge that there were messed up stitches at the beginning that were tolerable but noticeable. (I did, however, once again make a mistake, but this one isn't even noticeable unless you're REALLY anal.) Second of all, I've nearly memorized the entire pattern, which spans somewhere around 150 stitches and takes 16 rows to complete. So in the end it's good. But it severly cuts down on my productivity... Good thing I don't have a deadline for this sweater.
My other project got left at home because it was getting way too big to bring anywhere. It's a cardigan sweater, and it's MUCH easier that the Aran. I kept exclaiming to myself when I started "Wow, I'm already a third of the way done with the bottom part! ...Wow, it's halfway done!" It is a very welcome change from the frustration of the Aran. This cardigan is the "Fairly Easy Fair Isle" sweater from the book Stitch 'n Bitch Nation. I chose it because I get freezing cold at work with the obnoxious air conditioning in the summer and wanted something that would be warm and snuggly but not hugely bulky. I also chose it because I want to learn how to knit with colors, and this project has a little bit of color work that requires two new techniques for me - stranding and weaving.
I am modifying the original instructions a little bit - I am combining two sizes (large body, medium sleeves, which might be a bad idea, but...too bad), and in an effort to reduce sewing requirements, I'm knitting the sleeves in the round instead of flat (flat would require me to sew the sleeves together when I was done). In addition, I want to make the sleeves the same, exact length, so I'm working them both in the round at the same time on the same needles. There's probably a better description of how to do this, but I got it from the straight-laced sock pattern from Knitty. I'm trying to decide if the "extraspicy" designation of difficulty on this pattern is just because of the two-needles-two-socks-same-time technique or what. Having never really knit an entire sock, I'm not one to make the call. The 2n2s@st technique isn't so much hard as it is...stringy. There are needle cables and yarn all over the place, and when you add in Fair Isle knitting, that's even MORE yarn, so it gets a little messy-looking.
I started the Fair Isle part of the sleeves last night, and I was happy with what happened. I think that by the end of this sweater I'll have gotten the tension of the weaving and stranding all straightened out. I'm doing my Fair Isle with one yarn in each hand, and the hardest part for me thus far is wrapping the yarn with my right hand (English style) as I normally knit continental.
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