Friday, May 05, 2006

A little progress....

Dear Laura:

It seems like I should have more progress to report. You will laugh, but when I planned my time here, I somehow thought I would get more knitting done.

Now, that isn't as crazy as it sounds. I have to say that I have had a fair amount of free time.
I am, after all, the babysitter for 3 kids, not the mom. And, take right now for instance. The baby is sleeping and the other two are watching "the babysitter's best friend." There is nap time, and we have fairly early bedtime. I can knit while they play outside, or at the park...

But sometimes (ok, ok, often) when I sit down for a quiet minute, it turns out that my brain is mush! I think, "I could knit...or blog...or something," but it doesn't happen. Yesterday, I did sit down with my knitting during naps.....and then my snoring woke me up about 1/2 an hour later.

So, I have a meager gauge swatch and an inch of progress to show.














I started the gauge swatch doing a faster purl stitch, but it twists so you have to knit through the back loop on the next row. It turned out looking very uneven, so I went back to the usual way, and liked it better. (You can see where I made the switch.) The pattern is a 4-1 garter stitch rib. When I was doing the swatch, I figured that if I knit across, then purl 4, knit 1 on the back side I was doing more knit stitches, which is my preference.

However, when I started the pattern, I cast on and blindly knit the directions, which calls for knit 4, purl 1, then purl back across. Now that I'm an inch into it, I find it seems to make a difference. There is almost a hole on the front side when I do the purl. So I'm trying to decide if it bugs me enough to rip it back, or whether I'd like to keep knitting and grumbling and make more progress before I decide to frog it. I did consider switching at this point, but there would be a row that had two purls in a row, and that would bug me worse than the little holes and extra purling.

The other fun was when I noticed that the garter-stitch on the bottom of the sweater needed size 2 needles and the only ones I had with me were the DPNs that I used for the sockapaloooza socks. So, mental math mistake #1. 72 stitches, 5 needles, hmm, 72 divided by 5 should be about 12 stitches per needle. Mental math mistake #2. Whoops, this set only has 4 needles. 72 divided by 4...15-16 stitches per needle. Yes, you see it coming, don't you?? Only after I had them all arranged did it occur to me that I hadn't left myself a needle to knit with!! Oh my.

So! There's the progress on the baby sweater. The girls have been fed and are upstairs for nippy-nap (they don't have to sleep, but they have to stay in bed!) so I should be knitting. And I'm going to try really hard not to snore!

Keep knitting!

Cynthia (aka Designated Knitter)

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