System collapse

It’s been a while. And the reason for that is that here at MmmYarn I have had a whole bunch of knitting failure. Go figure. All these years of experience and this is where I am, at total knitting system collapse. It’s discouraging.

All right, before I get into all that, I guess I did do one thing right in the past month. I finally brought myself to finish the little hat that Mr. MmmYarn started last May, when he asked me to teach him to knit when he was practically crawling up the walls with boredom being cooped up all the time. I had him make a garter stitch band and then work in the round up the body. Last week I finished the last 7 rounds of the body and the crown and sewed that little seam at the band.

Pattern: Mr. MmmYarn’s own
Yarn: Mountain Colors Weaver’s Wool Quarters, color: Huckleberry (how very Nelson Munz)
Needles: size 6
Size: infant
Started 5/5/2009 and finished 2/2/2010

Matt always did have great taste in yarn and colors and his stitches are wonderfully even. He wanted to donate this to the hospital as a chemo cap but they won’t take this where I inquired so I am going to add it to the Afghans for Afghans pile. He would be OK with that.

How bad can the rest of it be, you ask? Here is the list.

The secret fuchsia pullover project is still in progress. Yes, still. I can’t believe it, either. I wove in all sleeve and body ends and made a neckline with facing. 4 times! The first time I had the decreases and increases reversed, increasing where I should have decreased and vice versa. So rip rip rip it went and I started again. And made the same mistake a second time. Gah! So out it went and this time I got the shaping right. Only now I had too many stitches on the neck and not enough on the body and everything was weirdly askew before I even noticed the problem. Out one more time. Do you want to see what I ended up with? It looks pretty good with its solid fuchsia lining:

So I guess not a total failure, but definitely a time-suck. Now it’s in the procrastination pile because I dislike putting buttonhole stitch around buttonholes. I am hopeless. That kid is getting bigger by the minute.

The little brown and blue double knitted hat that was coming along so slowly suddenly got faster when I got out of the double knitting part. The problem is my gauge toward the end of the pattern chart, where only a couple of stitches were in the pattern and the rest were all one solid color or another, is completely off the rest of the hat. It looks ridiculous and is sitting in the pile of things that need to be ripped and re-worked. I am only going to rip it to the point of major gauge change. The rest will come out in blocking.

Next up is sock failure. The first Froot Loop sock looks pretty good here, right?

Well, way way way too small for my foot. I worked about 6 inches of cuff before a try-on and that cuff will not go up over my heel. Or really anywhere near my heel. So I’ve cast on again with more stitches so I can put a separate purl stitch between each motif but the half inch I have done looks so big that I believe it might clothe the Jolly Green Giant. While he will look smashing in robin’s egg blue socks, I do want these to be my socks. I’m going to slog along for another couple of inches and if it’s still huge, I’ll redesign it to have a purl panel on the back of the leg. Or I’ll say the heck with it and make another sock with the gull wings pattern I’ve used before. We’ll see.

Bag failure is up next. The black Origami Bag is defying all attempts at being sewn together properly. It needs two little 5″ straight seams and my seams are crookeder than the squirrelly part of Lombard Street. Perhaps I’ll try drawing lines with a ruler and tailor’s chalk and see if I can manage to follow them. Or perhaps I will throw the darn thing in the garbage chute.

Non-knitting has been busy, too. The other things that kept me from writing here are more bank stuff (closing accounts for someone who is deceased is a long-term project) and I became an iPerson. I switched over to using our Mac computer because my little Windows computer is having several aggravating-but-not-fatal hardware problems that are more pricey to fix than the computer is worth. I do have Windows XP as a VMWare instance so I can keep Sweater Wizard and some of my card games and continue to play online Scrabble with my mom. There is a learning curve with the Mac: I keep using the wrong keyboard shortcuts and doing things I don’t mean to do. I will figure it out.

Oh, one more small thing is done. I managed a tiny sock. Yep, just one. It needs a mate. Sigh.