After arriving back home to Pittsburgh on Saturday, unpacking and repacking on Sunday - and finishing my Sockapaloooza socks!!! - I flew out to Colorado on Monday to attend the Keystone Symposia on HIV for work/school. More about that in another post, but this one is about knitting on the plane.
With the pair of socks done, I decided to get to work on another give-to-somebody project, the poncho that was supposed to be for Christmas. I had swatched last week and decided on a pattern adapted from the Sarah Blanche shawl from Folk Shawls. I decided to do two stupid things, which I discovered on the plane:
1. I chose to use straight needles instead of circulars. Why is this bad? Because when you have to loop the yarn around 3 times in one stitch, as the pattern calls for, that adds 2 stitches-worth of yarn onto your needle...and that doesn't fit on the straight needles I was using. I considered how to fix this problem during my trip...maybe I could steal the circular that is only a size smaller from the Wave Skirt I had also brought along...hm...
2. Before I had spent too much time trying to figure out how to solve this problem, I found another one. I don't have enough yarn. I had sort of wondered this when I first bought the yarn, but my mental calculations told me I should be fine. Since when do I trust my brain in a yarn store??? Not a good idea. I've used up about a quarter of the yarn I'm supposed to have for the front of the poncho, and the poncho is probabably...oh...one-eighth of the size it should be. Ugh.
I decided to accept defeat, not make this poncho for the friend (another example of the benefit of not telling people you're making them something - they won't hate you when you don't end up making it!), and try to make the yarn into a shirt of some sort - it's a cotton, so it would be pretty nice in the summer, although the colors aren't exactly my favorite for me.
Fortunately for me, I was overzealous and had packed not just one (the Wave Skirt) but two alternative knitting projects, just in case I finished the poncho. So, wavey-wave is finally getting some attention as I sit in lectures about HIV, and I cast on for the second Hermione mitten while traveling from one part of the conference resort to the other.
2 comments:
Sorry you hit a snag with Sarah Blanche ... I made that shawl earlier this year, and loved the project. I hope you decide to tackle it after you return home ...
I was actually inspired by a post about your Sarah Blanche on your blog! There just isn't enough yarn to make it now, but perhaps when I have some more, other yarn... It is a great pattern.
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