3/15/2006
Well, on Monday about when SnB was to start I completed the current portion of my Nautical Blankie swatch. It now needs steeking and the side borders put on. There is a slight problem though - it’s a bit narrow (even narrower than a sock) for steeking on a sewing machine. I also followed the steeking directions that Snow used for Blankie one which means I added in only 4 stitches which means not much wiggle room and an even number so I can’t do the crocheted steek as that requires an odd number. I think I’m probably stuck with hand stitching, but that isn’t as secure with superwash. Then again, it is a swatch that will get photographed and then who knows what will happen to it so I guess durability isn’t of huge importance. I think I may use some fusible webbing as a back-up to my hand sewing skills anyway though. We’ll see.
We are to have a steeking party at some point, but I have no idea when it might happen as the others aren’t ready yet. I may become a brave soldier at some point and charge ahead on my own. For one, that wrinkly mass is mocking me. Everyone says that it’ll block out, but dang, it seems like an awful lot of puckers that need to block out of a rather small piece of knitting.
I’m quite glad that I swatched it. I did digital mock-ups but I think the anchor needs a bit of tweaking and I hadn’t felt that way when I saw it in the mock-up, but I do now in the swatch. Hear that Snow? Don’t cast-on yet, I’m still tweaking (or rather don’t get to the anchors yet)…
I have cast on for a coordinating hat and since I can do that on a circ it is looking much better. Thank goodness! I was starting to loose my confidence in my colorwork skills… Of course that has me a bit reserved to do socks… But perhaps that would go better for me on 2 circs…
3/10/2006
There hasn’t been a ton of knitting going on around here seeing as how I have been getting the laptop up and running again most of the week. That said, there has been progress since you last saw things, much of which took place over the weekend, but there were times this week that I took solace in my knitting (had to rip frequently as all the stress wreaked havoc on my gauge, but…).
So, first up, we have the lovely Emma dog showing off the length of my Flower of Life scarf. I don’t knit on it too frequently, but it is now to the point that I don’t have to think about it much at all so it is pretty good visiting knitting. It still isn’t ideal TV or movie knitting because of all the PSSOs there are, but progress is being made every now and again. That’s a 30-lb dog for scale :-) Okay, so Emma isn’t a good example for scale. I haven’t measured the length, but I would suspect it is closing in on three feet in length soon and I believe there is more than half of the yarn left yet so this will be a very generous scarf!
This is the swatch of the Nautical Blankie I am designing for Snow but in an alternate colorway. I’ve just begun the tesselating wave to go from the medium blue to the light blue, then I’ll have about 20 more rows to go and it’ll be time for the top border, followed by steeking and the side borders.
To say I’m disappointed in my knitting on this is an understatement. It seems that knitting to this gauge with fingering weight while stranding is a much fussier proposition than doing so with worsted or aran weight yarn. My mitten hasn’t even been blocked and I think it looks great. This swatch? Crap!
I’m doing some serious praying that it will improve once the steeking is complete and it can be properly blocked. I think perhaps I should have gone up a needle size and knit a bit tighter. But, I am doing a better and more efficient job of catching the floats and that is a good thing. I didn’t have too many floats to catch on the mitten. It’s a learning process. If I have to knit another swatch, I have to knit another swatch. Though I am thinking about knitting a cute little baby hat to coordinate which would hopefully look a little bit better because I wouldn’t be on DPNs trying to get the right length of floats across needle joins.
While my knitting on this one has disappointed me greatly, I’m very happy with the pattern. I’d be happier if I didn’t have to generate the charts once again. But, oh well!
We’re ordering a jump drive that I can back up current projects on and an external hard drive to do weekly temporary back-ups to in between the DVD+R back-ups. Obviously another hard drive is not the optimum place to back-up to, but the number of DVD+Rs it would take to back-up my system on a weekly basis is mind numbing. The DVD+R back-ups will take place quarterly when I do my sales tax paperwork. That way I will have an association with another non-negotiable task so it’ll get done more regularly (though the main problem with the old hard drive was that the bad sectors on it prevented a sucessful back-up and yes, I had the hard drive I should have made time to install it - live and learn).
