Ugh, my knitting plans are not going smoothly at the moment.
I currently have a striped sweater on my needles – I posted
here about swatching a couple of weeks ago.
It was going well, and I’ve made good progress on the body while I was
on holiday and this morning I finished the turned hem.
I’m using a Colourmart cotton/cashmere yarn that I know will
shrink on washing, but the sweater was looking huge this morning. I decided to wash it before starting on the
sleeves, to see if it would shrink the amount I expected, and it hasn't! It's still both longer and wider than I anticipated it would be. The length isn’t too
much of a problem – I can always rip out the bottom few inches and shorten it –
but it appears to be about 3 inches too wide across the shoulders.
Now, this sweater is knitted top down in one piece, so of
course altering the shoulders means ripping the whole thing out and starting
again. It is actually still drying on
the bed in the spare room, so I suppose it would be sensible to wait until it’s
dry and try it on, but so far it’s not looking good.
While the sweater is drying I decided to cast on for my
Chelsea skirt.
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| Chelsea skirt and Donegal Soft yarn. |
I swatched like a good
knitter and got gauge, so all was good. But
so far this afternoon I’ve cast on 197 stitches (twice), knitted 4 rows (once),
and 6 rows (once) and ripped the whole thing out (twice). The textured herringbone pattern is a repeat
of 7 stitches and 4 rows, 2 of which are purl.
Can I get it right? No,
apparently I can’t!
The trouble with this one is the yarn is tweedy and it’s
really hard to see where I’ve made a mistake until I get to the end of a row
and have the wrong number of stitches left. And I know what I’m doing wrong, which makes it
even more frustrating!
As you can imagine I’m feeling rather deflated over both my
current projects at the moment. I really
want them both to work, but right now I’ve lost confidence in both of
them.
I think I might just have to pour myself a large glass of
wine and forget about them both until another day.
Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day - I'm planning on taking a trip to the V&A to see their ballgowns exhibition.
Cheers!
Oooh, don't forget to enter my little birthday giveaway.
Definitely sounds as if you need to put it down and walk away - how frustrating! Have a super time at the V&A, it is in my 'to visit' list. :)
ReplyDeleteThank you Jacq! I did just that... and had a wonderful visit to the V&A. I also sorted out the problem with the skirt last night!
DeleteYikes, one of those days! Sometimes (especially when knitted in bigger scale than a swatch) some wool/cashmere can pull out and look huge while blocking, but when it dries it pulls in nicely... I had a hat that stretched waaaaay out during blocking and I was really worried. But when it have dried completely it shrank back to normal size. A mystery. Maybe this is one of those yarns so perhaps all is not lost. :)
ReplyDeleteThank you. Sadly although the bottom half of the sweater is now fine, the shoulders are much, much to wide for me. It's going away into the cupboard while I decide what to do.
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