Detours and other mishaps ...

Sadly, my camera is still in need of batteries, so no new yarnalicious pictures. (Like that word? I'm sure someone has used it before me.)

Just this old one from last week.



To be honest, the shawl doesn't look that much different! Just bigger. I've finished the flower design of the body, and have moved on to the edging, not without a few detours along the way.


Detour 1: I wanted to knit 13 repeats of the flower design to make it a bit bigger. But after reading other people's project notes on Ravelry, I knew it would be a tight squeeze for the amount of yarn I had. And I wasn't about to spend almost $40 on another skein. (Sigh, I wish.) So after the 12th repeat, I gave myself a lifeline and began the 13th, using my mom's food scale to weigh the remaining yarn as I went.

I'm not sure that the food scale was much help, seeing as the space between 40 and 30 grams was about the size of a fingernail. :-P But I chickened out/realized I was being foolish, and so had my first experience of ripping back to a lifeline and picking up all the stitches.


Detour 2: Resigned to having only 12 repeats, I set about knitting the border chart. Nupps were still several rows off, and the pattern was easy to memorize and knit while reading. Until row 5.

That was when things stopped matching the pattern below it in the way I thought it should. But what did I know? Maybe the pattern was supposed to look all random and raggedy at this point, despite the neatly aligned rows of stitches before.

So I kept on knitting, until, halfway through the row, I realized there was no way I had the right number of stitches. So I tinked (unknit stitch by stitch) that half a row. And then the purl row before that. And then the whole row before that, where I had been adding two yarn overs to every chart repeat, resulting in 64 extra stitches. Whoops.


I am now past that point and on my first nupp row, so all is (relatively) well.



As for reading: I am almost finished In the Hall of the Dragon King. Sadly, I have *cough* broken a second Kindle, which means I'm finishing it on my computer screen. Argh. This one wasn't my fault, really. I can't believe it. These things are EXPENSIVE. Sigh.

Anyway, I am off to plan class and pick up a bridesmaid dress and look at wax models of wedding rings and take a dance lesson. Blessings to all and happy yarning along with Ginny!