Wednesday, January 9, 2008

More Pleats

Few things are more distressing than trying to get some blogging done in the quiet of early morning and discovering that the Internet is down. Not permanently down: down until the power strip that the router is plugged into gets switched back on. Por desgracia, the router and its power strip are in Hermanita's room, which has a squeaky door, which means I had to sit and wait and knit until I could resurrect our network.

But sitting and knitting isn't such a bad thing. Side two (the piece that was knitted in the correct dimensions the first time) finished without a hitch.



I surprised myself with a moment of perspicacity: measure the ribbing on the first (wrong dimensions) piece--stretched to its greatest horizontal reach--then measure my own greatest horizontal reach and see how the two match up. Yes, this seems elementary. No, I don't know why I hadn't thought of doing such a thing until this project. Good thing I thought of it now: I discovered a shocking discrepancy in the two dimensions (we won't go into exact amounts), and went up a needle size for the ribbing on the second, correctly knitted piece.

That pitfall avoided, it was time to rip into side one. For those of you who have never tried it, sewn bind off takes eons to pick out, and if you discover a need to do so it in black mohair, don't. After the BO, ripping back went quickly, and I was further surprised by how little remorse I felt as I pulled out a solid week of work. The yarn is looking a little frail and bedazzled by all the wear



Luckily, it's knitting up OK. Here's where I am as of this morning:



Handy-dandy sheep gauge/needle measure thrown in for scale. (I love that thing. It is worth every penny, and like all the best knitting tools, can function as a weapon in a pinch. Check out the feet.)

Where is the anticipated conflict? Right here



The use of twice-knit yarn and adjusting the tension of one's hands to the tension of stitched roughly roused from their repose has resulted in a rough gauge. The picture hasn't caught the worst of it, but it's there. I see blocking on my horizon. Bleugh.

Things are looking up. The outlook is quite rosy. If this were a Jonathan Stroud novel, you would read those words with a sinking in the pit of your stomach, knowing that the mere fact that a character has thought that will doom them to tribulation in the following chapters. Despite just having finished Ptolemy's Gate, I still have my sights set on a Jane Austen ending.

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