Knitting In Public

Well over a year ago (!) I was working on a lovely sock pattern with an online KAL for Jeanie Townsend’s Maple Leaf socks. There were lots of questions about how to manage some of the stitches, and Jeanie helped everyone out with countless explanations (sometimes over and over and over). I decided to make mine two-colored, using KnitPicks yarns (bare and Memories in Redwood Forest, a discontinued color), as I thought it looked like autumn leaves. Just for fun, and to break up the plainness of the bare yarn, I put in a little stripe at the toe.

Of course, I then got distracted with lots of other knitting… and time went by. Lots of time. I had already started my knitting notebook - having been caught more than once on something I had not finished, and when trying to complete the item later I could not remember yarn or needle size or something else important. So I have notes on changes I made to the pattern. Even so, I found that my notes were not quite complete enough….

When I decided to finish this pair of socks, I could not immediately find the pattern and notes I had made. My “usual” sock is 64 stitches on a size 1 needle. So, I counted the stitches around the top of the completed sock, and came up with 64 stitches.

I knit the ribbing, and in the interim attempted to find the pattern I had printed off. No such luck. I stopped for a bit and knit on something else. I went back to this sock, determined to finish. I finally printed off another copy of the sock pattern, and noticed this:

Ooops. So I ripped out the ribbing and started over. I knit the ribbing, following my handwritten notes that I had only knit 18 rows of ribbing. I noted that in the pattern itself, I added an extra plain row between maple leaf patterns. I followed the instructions all the way down to the heel flap. Then as I started the heel flap, I doubled checked against the completed sock, to be sure I hadn’t made an adjustment in the width of the heel. Hmmm. These numbers weren’t coming out right….

Do you see a difference? One sock has 64 stitches (left), and the other has 72 stitches! In the interim of looking for the pattern, I had completely forgotten that I had counted the stitches on the other sock (not just presumed that it was 64 since that is my usual sock size)! So I went back to the KAL emails, and discovered that there were emails from several participants who complained about not being able to use a pattern that called for 72 stitches, so Jeanie rewrote the pattern several times over, for both a 56 stitch and 64 stitch sock! So, I printed the instructions for the 64 stitch sock, ripped back the second sock to the beginning again, and reknit - again - the ribbing, etc.  I’m now just a few rows from starting the heel flap again.

So, let this be a lesson. Take notes on every stinking minute detail, and start that second sock sooner!

Oh - and coming soon, news on this:

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Hanami, Socks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.