Thursday, December 19, 2013

10 Stitch Failure

        
       As you might know, I'm not much of a knitter. But that never seems to stop me from taking on really ambitious projects.
       For an example, I still haven't finished that cable scarf, but a few days ago I decided that I was going to knit a blanket. Yeah, I know... don't ask. Now, I have no idea how I even came across this pattern, and I'm not really sure what came first, the pattern or the tutorial, but I found it and decided that I had to knit it.
       It seemed easy enough, the only skills that you need to know going into it is how to cast on (which I can remember, if I try hard enough) and the basic knit stitch (which I know). Everything else you need to know, Staci walks you through in the video. I watched a bit of the video, and then went ahead and cast on my 10 stitches.
       I was knitting along, and it was actually going great. I got to my first (and then immediately after, my second) mitered corner, and it wasn't hard at all! I was knitting up this blanket like a pro! I was even attaching my knitting to itself with ease. I had knitted up a nice size piece:


I took a picture for my ravelry page 

   
       I actually had a lot more knitted than that, and now I'm kind of wishing I had taken another picture, but... oh well. I started out with some brown yarn I had laying around, left over from another project I had finished a month or so ago (maybe I'll post about it later?), and I wasn't really too crazy about it. When I started the blanket, I wasn't sure that I would actually be able to do it, so I just picked up some scrap yarn and started fooling around.
       However, when it became clear that I was actually accomplishing a blanket-like object, I realized that I was going to have to jazz things up, color-wise. For one thing, I don't have nearly enough of the brown scrap for an entire blanket, even just the lap-throw I was planing on. And secondly, I didn't particularly care for the color. So I thought I'd mix things up with some nice green yarn I also had laying around.

       And that's when everything went to shit. I have no idea what I possibly did wrong, but I certainly screwed something up. I attached my first row of green, flipped my work to knit up the wrong-side row, and counted 11 stitches... Fuck! What did I do? I tried tearing out just the last row of knitting to do it again, but that didn't work, and I decided that I should just take out the green and go back to knitting with the brown. I could try to re-attach a second color later.
       But that didn't work either! Suddenly, all of the rows that I had joined to my previous knitting started to come off! I was left with strips of knitting with angry raw-looking loops on the end! My whole blanket had come apart in strips!

       OMG! I still have no idea what I could have possibly done wrong, but I'm super upset with myself right now. Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh! I guess there's nothing for it but to rip everything apart, which is what I'm doing now. I'm frustrated, but trying to look at the positives. I wasn't really too into the brown color, and this gives me a chance to start over fresh. I was really just fooling around in the first place, and now that I know I can actually knit this thing, I can pick up some pretty yarn that I actually like, and make something I'm really proud of.

     I guess that means I'm off to the store to pick up some more yarn... As a great space-commander once said, "Never give up, never surrender!" I don't think he was talking about knitting, but it applies.

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