When Everything goes TERRIBLY wrong.

As a warning, if you are not a knitter, you will neither appreciate nor understand the tragedy below:

I've been knitting long enough to know that like road trip, even the best planned ones go awry. I'm a big fan of spontaneous side trips and taking the road less traveled. That being said, I do like to spend a few minutes to look at a map and orient myself with the world around me. So I finally decided to hop on the bandwagon to knit the Gathered Scarf that's been repeatedly knitted all around Ravelry. What could be so hard about that? There's garter (all knits) and sections of stockinette (knits and purls) and you switch off needles with each section. The needles are pretty distinct, mine have the special bonus of being different colors as well. :) There are no words to describe how everything quickly spiraled out of control.

It started, innocently enough with a different project. The My So Called Scarf in some beautifully dyed orchard yarn. 540 yards of sock yarn in beautiful hues of red, green, creams and just a hint of brown. All the colors you expect to see in an apple orchard. Hours and days of knitting later, I realized that I ran out of yarn. And the dyer was no longer dyeing yarn so I couldn't get more. But it was so perfect. I searched for eons for anyone who dyed a similiar colorway and found it.

She agreed to dye it on whatever yarn I'd like that she had in stock. So I chose shokay orient. A great blend of bamboo (satisfying my inner panda) and yak (time to figure out why everyone thinks this is amazing stuff). It arrived in a beautiful swirl of red and green. And I started to knit the My So Called Scarf pattern- only it resulted in really bad pooling and I just couldn't fix it no matter how many how many stitches I casted on or the needles I used. So I spoke to Kristin from Green Mountain Fibers and she volunteered graciously to redye the yarn. It got lost in the mail. I think Santa must have taken it since I mailed it to her around Christmas Eve and she didn't receive it until the end of January, 1 month later.

At this point, I really should've listened to fate, the knitting fairies, all beings mystic and supernatural. But I didn't. Once I received the re-dyed yarn, all I kept thinking about was what pattern to use it for. And I finally found a pattern, only I couldn't cast on the right number of stitches. I know how to count to 30, but apparently when yarn and needles are involved, not so much. Then my needles were small, so I went up a couple of sizes. Then it was too big. By the time I found the goldlilocks of knitting needles, I carefully casted on. Except as I did the first row of knit stitches, I realized I was off, YET AGAIN. By the end of the evening I had managed 3 rows of garter stitch and then just gave up.

There's nowhere to go after garter stitch. This isn't like casting on 300 stitches of lace and then going ok that's it, all I want is to do some simple garter or stockinette. Or if you used sock needles to get through a huge part of a sock, you could just go find larger needles and work on a simpler project. I was using big needles, a beautifully soft yarn and could not knit. The only lesson I've learned is that sometimes the yarn is a little hexed and there's just no way around it, but what do I care? I finally have 3 rows of garter stitch knitted.


Edited: 5/1/09 Project has been frogged and is waiting to become something else. Some days you really just can't win!