bobblybobblybobbly

A very strange thing has happened to my growing yarn fixation. In each of the three yarn shops I've gone into lately, I've found myself ending my judicious, dignified wander accidentally plastered up against the novelty yarn section, salivating. If it has bobbles, sparkles, feathers, bits, beads or gosh-darned bojangles, some eternally eight-year-old part of my subconscious seems to desire it passionately.

This is very weird. When indulging my first love, which is fabric, I'm a complete fibre snob: I like cotton, linen, silk, viscose. My habitual stance is to wander around fabric stores letting loose my fine homing instinct for colour (black, jewel tones); then, gaze fixed in the middle distance, I fixatedly fondle the fabric. If there's too high a concentration of synthetic, my mien assumes the disdainful expression of a snobby duchess who's just detected something a little off about the fish, and I drop the offending cloth contemptuously, in extreme cases wiping my hand on my skirt. (You can imagine that fabric store assistants love this). Anything above about 15% synthetic gets me. I hate it. I always feel as though I can't breathe when I'm wearing it.

The thing about novelty yarn, of course, is that most of it represents the 1001 Really Interesting Things We Can Do With Unnatural Bits Of Thing. It's uniformly acryllicoid. The spangles and dangles and what have you are clearly Best Quality Plastic, and make no bones about it. And, weirdly enough, this doesn't seem to matter - while absolutely open to the more elevated seductions of mohair, wool and banana fibre, I am still possessed of an unholy desire to knit the unholy plastic novelty stuff. This also, of course, takes absolutely no notice of the fact that my knitting skills are currently barely up to perfectly straight and straightforward yarn; I shudder to think of the interesting space-time tangles I could generate with boucle. Also, it's not as if I'd ever wear any of it, or not at least without someone giving me a great deal of bribe money and a personality transplant.

I have thus far, with consummate self-control, prevented myself from actually acquiring any of this glittery froufrou, but I have a horrible feeling it's only a matter of time until I'm tying myself to the sofa, now with added sequins. When the hour is nigh, I shall have to do my damndest to channel the urge into actual mohair boucle in that beautiful greeny blue. In fact, I might have to go and acquire it tomorrow. Dammit.

In other news: more space-time warpage! Robynn, is this dratted dishcloth actually supposed to be giving me a stockinette stitch border and garter stitch bands of colour, or am I doing something weird to the row count while perving Doctor Who?

slippage, rapturous, for the use of

It being a new year and all, I made the Symbolic Gesture of breaking out the two colours of cotton yarn and the beautiful rosewood 4.5mm needles, and having a go at the ballband dishcloth Robynn suggested. This was a bit weird, since the smaller needles and the texture of the cotton are a serious paradigm shift after quantities of aran-weight swiss cheese, but I didn't allow this to faze me. After all, I thought, there's still purling to come...

I have discovered that my space-time problem with purl is not, in fact, purl. I knitted a perfect row of purl first-off, no wibbles or continuum warps. It looks kinda cool. I am forced to conclude that the problem I have is in trying to alternate plain and purl. I suspect they're like matter and anti-matter, and therefore shouldn't exist in the same universe. Row. Whatever.

I spent most of the morning stuck at Row 3 in the pattern, which casually tells me "Join B". I had five different websites up with instructions for joining wool of a different colour. None of them made any sense (although this may be partially attributable to the fact that I had to wake up at 5.30 this morning to take my mother to the airport and consequently have no brain; also, the Evil Landlord's computer keeps randomly rebooting, kicking me off the wireless each time, usually in the middle of a complicated knitting video). I couldn't work out what I was actually trying to do here - tuck a new colour miraculously in so that I knit with alternately one and then the other, carrying the unused colour along with me concealed in a small alternate dimension? or starting a new row with a new colour and snipping the old one? or simply leaving the old one by the wayside like a discarded boot until I get bored with hopping? yours, confused. Also, the instruction "slip" sounded fraught with peril. Historically speaking, I break limbs when I slip, or at the very least dislocate something. Possibly the space-time continuum. Again.

Eventually, tired of squinting at the screen and muttering to myself, I damned well joined the second colour and simply obeyed the pattern, trusting to luck and the tangled gods of knitting and idiots. It helped that I finally found a site that explained slipping (it's so simple most don't bother). I am now six rows into the pattern, with no more incident than accidentally knitting the trailing end of the plaster on my left forefinger into a stitch, and having to be vigilant for the occasional picked-up stitch with all this yarn forwarding and backing. I am overcome with awe at the sneaky colour-play resulting from leaving all these slipped stiches hanging in this callous way and anchoring them with the forward/back bit. Knitting. It's cool.

holes in the fabric of space-time

I have to report progress!



The First Seven Rows of My First Scarf, posed artistically on a handy third-year Shrek essay. Those look almost like rows, yes? and the big chunky gaps are the correct and relevant big chunky gaps for the Swiss Cheese Scarf. There are probably the buried corpses of ninja errors in there, but that's because my ninja-burial skills are still a bit rudimentary. At least, however, I'm zotting the little sods before they multiply, even if there is the odd limb sticking up out of the grave. And this refers completely and only to dropped stitches: I still have five stitches too many at the end of the last row, and no idea where they came from or how to make them wriggle back into the void. Darned space-time.

Knitting is still a highly private occupation because I suspect I look bloody ridiculous while knitting, particularly while binding off: the hunched posture, the deep frown of concentration, the pitifully unco-ordinated movements, the swearing... Binding off requires knitting in reverse. This is possibly unnecessarily cruel to a ham-fisted beginner, but I have to say I picked it up faster than I did purling. Purling is still my nemesis. And I absolutely cannot work out how to cast on in this pattern. Long-tailed cast-on, which I have down, clearly doesn't work when you're halfway through a row. Two-needle cast-on is giving me unaesthetic snarls. I shall persevere a bit, and then go and find an actual knitter who can lead me gently by the hand through the thickets of stitches.

redo from start

I've finally worked out what my problem is with this knitting binge. It's not that I don't know how to knit properly, it's that I don't know how to knit improperly. More accurately, before you're all yelling "Knit Naked!" slogans, I don't actually know how to deal with errors.

Basically, I don't get errors, I get highly-trained Ninja Errors. They sneak into my work, cat-footed and blending into the shadows, so that it's all fine when I check it, but three stitches later there are errors going back four rows and raising whole families of little baby errors with nauseating enthusiasm. (The Sex Life Of The Common Garter Stitch. Scary stuff).

I don't know what I do to get these errors. (Well, I've ironed out the extra-stitch ones, thanks to various kind suggestions from Teh Internets. Teh Internets taught me to knit. Fact.) But crossed stitches? weird bobbly bumps at the base of the stitch? sudden ginormous loops that span three stitches which I could have sworn were perfectly normal on the previous row? No clue. Ninja errors. Their ways are mysterious.

Not knowing how I got them, it's actually very difficult for me to do anything about them. The first few (dozen) times an error happened (note the careful passive tense), I ripped the whole thing back and started from scratch. (This is why I'm now very good at casting on). The last few times I've ripped carefully back to the error, picked up all the stitches, on at least one occasion taken them off the needle and carefully picked them up again right way round, and then sat staring blankly at the mistake, occasionally poking it feebly with a needle to see if it miraculously jumped into position. Then I ripped the whole thing back and started from scratch.

Any time now it's going to occur to me to take this poor multi-knitted tangle of yarn to someone who actually knows what they're doing, and humbly beg for enlightement. And, possibly, gin.