Quick...Before it dies!

I have been experiencing no end to the technical difficulties in my life recently so alas my blog is one area which has been sorely neglected. But! I wanted to share with you (quickly...before my computer dies [again]) where part of my afternoon today went / is going:






To be continued....

M is for Muggle

And a muggle is what I feel like. Just when I think I've gotten the hang of this knitting thing, I go and do something of muggle-rific proportions.

I'm currently working on Ms. Marigold by Zephyr Style and now that I've joined in the round, I'm getting bored knitting round and round so I thought I'd mix it up by knitting the neckline ribbing and then coming back to the body.

So I went and bought (what I thought was) an appropriately sized needle (the pattern calls for size 5 and 3 needles and since I'm using 7's for the 5's to meet the gauge, I figured I needed a 5 instead of the 3) and came home and started picking up stitches. The pattern warns to make sure to pick up enough that the neckline doesn't pucker when you knit it so I picked up A LOT of stitches. I didn't think much of it, though, as the pattern warns you that you will have a lot of stitches. In the end I spent 3 hours (3 hours!!!) just picking up the stitches. Several more hours of knitting ribbing later, I cast off and viola! I have....wait....a ruffle? Sometime between picking up and casting off, a ruffle assassinated my neckline and took its place.

I think out of fear I wouldn't pick up enough, I picked up WAY too many stitches and now I'm going to have to frog hours of knitting on this stupid neckline so I can try again (but I think I'll finish the body first).

In (somewhat) happier news, my new ball winder came in the mail yesterday. This will come in handy for when I frog my wicked sweater (the sleeves are entirely too large and as this is a top-down sweater, I don't see how this is fixable) and my husband's Christmas sweater (which came out too large in some parts and too small in others. Plus it looks funny).

Anybody else noticing a pattern? Yeah. I feel like a friggin' muggle. At this point I NEED Ms. Marigold to turn out okay lest I resign myself to only knitting socks, hats, and baby clothes from now on (these seem to have turned out okay....adult sweaters? Not so much). That, and I think my husband is starting to wonder why I spend hours knitting things only to have them not fit and so I just end up unraveling them.

***ding ding ding***

There goes my timer. I guess it's time for my pity party to be up.

Here's a picture of a cupcake to cheer you up:

Goodbye Hedera

At first this was going to be a post about the wonderful Hedera sock. Shadkitty is a sockophile and she inspired me to try socks again (my first pair have some issues. They make good hiking socks but aren’t very pretty). So after scouring the internet trying to find a beginner-friendly pattern, I happened upon Hedera on Knitty. It’s a Cookie A sock, so it’s beautiful but it didn’t have a confusing lace chart I was going to have to figure out how to read.


So I swatched up and jumped in. After finishing the ribbing (which I hated….mostly because I had decided to try and knit elastic into the cuff which made it both boring and time intensive…yeah, that was dumb) and got to the fun part, it became rather addicting. The pattern was easy and it looked really neat. I’d work on my sock before bed, dream about my sock, and couldn’t wait for lunch time at work so I could work on it some more. But after 2 repeats of the lace pattern, I began to notice a problem….the holes on one side of (what was supposed to be) the symmetrical eyelet were nicely defined and the holes on the other side were very, very tiny. I figured maybe it just needed to be blocked? Hmm. So I kept going.

After 5 repeats of the lace pattern, something looked off. The lace was really pretty but it didn’t look like the picture. (see figures A and B)

So after some research I realized I was making my yarnovers the wrong way….which apparently didn’t matter for half of the holes but did for the others. !#$?!%&!


I didn’t know what to do. If I start doing it properly now, the sock will look funny. I suppose I could always finish this sock and then do the second one wrong on purpose so they match? In the end, I came to the sad realization that I was going to have to frog. So today during lunch I said goodbye to my good friend Hedera and began anew on Hedera II.


This is Gertrude helping me with Hedera II:

Hopefully Gertrude will be better at this knitting thing than me.