bad knitter, no biscuit

Gosh, yes, she says offhandedly, tracing embarrassed circles with her toe, I have this knit blog thing, don't I? Oh dear.

The lack of knit-blogging has had a lot to do with the lack of actual knitting, since I finished the banana-fibre scarf in an excess of zeal (and Farscape), and then rested panting on my laurels for a while. Then the really bad 'flu hit and the glandular fever hit back. Then work got seriously crazy for about three weeks, leaving me too denuded of energy to actually lift the needles. Then the edited book came back from the proof-reader and I spent three weeks quarrelling with Oxford commas and the "which/that" controversy. Then there was an unfortunate, doomed and temporary love affair with mohair (not the kid mohair) which ended up in emotional tangles and broken hearts all round, or at the very least broken threads, and about which I really don't want to talk. Then I went away for a long weekend to a game farm, and started knitting again:



Things I Have Learned:

1. Mohair is a bugger.
   
2. Cotton, on the other hand, is possibly my one true love, at least for the moment. (That's a cotton washcloth, this one).
   
3. Game farms are exceptionally beautiful spots to knit in, even in the freezing cold dawn on the balcony.
   
4. Banana fibre scarves are adequately warm for game viewing, and rather snazzy.
   
5. Now that I'm back into knitting mode, the latest infection is a perfectly unholy and random desire to knit lace. Probably with the kid mohair, which I confidently expect won't snarl like the other fuzzy stuff I've been wrestling.
   
6. Knitting is highly contagious. Inadequate quarantine has resulted in my mother, possibly frustrated beyond belief by witnessing my fumbling efforts, rediscovering knitting after a fifteen-year hiatus. (Robynn, your fell influence is spreading. You may now gloat ;>).Apart from a mad outbreak of woolly hats for the game farm trip (mine's purple), she has spent the last few days knitting clothes for the felt teddy bear she made for my niece. I am utterly charmed.
   
   
   
   Da Niece (now aged nearly 3, and moving into the Experimental Linguistics phase) informs us that his name is Bottop Bear.

F.O.

I did it! It's a dishcloth! My first ever finished project!



The camera is still doing horrible things to the colour, and viewers are asked not to look too closely at the snarly bits where the yarn separated out. Cotton seems to be evil that way. Also, what do I do with the dangling ends of yarn? My cats want to play with them.

I finished this while watching "Blink" again, still one of my favourite Doctor Who episodes ever, even though it scares me off the couch and occasionally out of the room even on the third watching. I have, however, discovered that looking steadfastly at one's knitting during creepy bits is a very good for defusing the wimpy terror, as well as being randomly good for my knitting.

Now I want to try dishcloths in different colour combinations. This is mostly to prevent me from having to go back to the swiss cheese scarf, which has suddenly reverted to its space/time warping ways, and is refusing to add up to the correct number of stitches. As usual, I blame quantum.

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.

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.

the divvil made me do it

Or more accurately, Robynn. It's all her fault, (a) that I started knitting at all, she encouraged me, the pusher, and (b) that she pointed out what a good blog name "Purl-handled revolver" would make, and it turned out to be a google-whack. The daft, arcane and tangled gods of knitting are clearly making their will known.

This whole knitting binge started with a post on my other blog, thusly:

As a result of a random concatenation of circumstances, I just spent an hour reading through The Panopticon. It's a knitting blog. It's very well written and very funny, and features Dolores the cabaret sheep. It has also, in a response straight out of left field, and a horror hitherto unknown in my personal life, left me with a serious desire to overthrow the prejudice of a lifetime and take up actual knitting.

I feel an intervention is required here. I would be grateful if the relevant people would perform the following tasks:
(a) Non-knitting friends, please forcibly restrain me from this madness, pointing out its roots in psychological insecurity, life-avoidance and the frivolous desire for pretty clothes, and the unavoidable fact that, whatever I might fondly imagine, it's likely to teach me exactly the opposite of patience.
(b) Knitting friends, of whom I seem to have incredible stonkloads, please advise me as to the most user-friendly, low-grade projects likely to ease me gently into the long, hard process of converting some of my many thumbs to actual fingers while entangling myself in miles of yarn. The ultimate production of genuine articles of clothing would be a bonus.

God, I must be mad.

Since I received nothing but enthusiastic support, I am currently four rows into my first scarf for the fifth time. I should point out that I am thirty-mumble years old, and last knitted sometime in the dawn of time, when I was still in junior school. I hated it and was very bad at it. Even now, I regard knitting with a sort of paranoid fear: not only am I terrible at it, but I'm firmly convinced I'll actually unknit the fabric of space and time with some of these stitches.

This blog is for chronicling, in words and pictures, the slow and laboured progress of my acquisition of knitting skills. This alternative venue will prevent me being growled at or lynched by the readers of my other blog who think knitting is weird.

I should state now, for the record, up front, that even if I achieve respectable levels of skill at this game, I won't knit socks.