Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Decison made

I finally made a decision about completing or frogging the edge of Rosebuddie. In doing so I discovered that I really can't follow instructions sometimes, first I completely got the yarn requirements mucked up (I'm not sure how I did that), and second I made a chart reading error that changed the way the lace worked. Let me explain.
A few days ago I dug out the blanket and thought that I'd better finish knitting the edge up to the next corner. I had weighed the yarn remaining at the last corner, and by knitting to the next corner and weighing the yarn again I would be able to work out how much yarn the edging would consume. I'd been avoiding this project for at least a week, so the chart had become a distant memory. I looked at it with fresh eyes.
The little dot in the lower right corner of the K2tog square

As I looked at the chart I wondered why there was a little dot in the lower corner of the box with the k2tog symbol. As soon as I realised the dot was there I realised what the dot meant, the stitch was to be purled, not knit .... So I knit the next pattern repeat following the chart exactly, purling those two stitches together - just to see what would happen. I liked what happened, the connecting stitches between the blanket body and the blanket edge formed wee eyelets. When I p2tog rather than k2tog both sides of the eyelets were edged with little chains.
Bother, I liked the pairs of chains, so finally the decision was made. I was going to frog and completely reknit the boarder as charted, so undo the one and a half sides of border I had already knit.
P2tog = Chain, K2tog = bumpy mess.
At first I carefully slipped   row at a time off the needle and frogged carefully back to the stitch that was edge stitch of the blanket body. That took forever, so I got brave and slipped 5 or 6 rows off the needle and pulled the border stitches free of the blanket body as I slipped the stitches on the needle.

Frogging the slow way
Then I realized that I could just pick up all the stitches along the edge, mostly as I had knit then rather than purled them so they sat at an odd angle and were easy to see. Then it was just a matter of raveling, frogging the lace border back to the second corner, at which point I weighed the yarn, then I frogged back to the first corner and weighed the yarn again. For this size blanket it takes 9 grams of yarn to knit the boarder on one edge, there are four edges, so 36gram required. And yes I know that the blanket will be larger if I knit more body repeats, so I will need more yarn to knit the edge - its all a guesstimate at the moment. 
Frogging the quicker way


Here I am all ready to go, and at this point I checked the yarn requirements and discovered that I had read 1000-1650 yards as if it was meters. I didn't need 1000 meters, I only needed 914meters, I had 850m, so in effect had plenty of yarn, enough that dropping a needle size should save me the 65m I was missing.
Ready to go again.
So here I am, frogged and ready to go, the yarn broke so I now have two balls of yarn rather than one. No worries as chart D is a fairly dense lace so plenty of scope to weave in ends there.

2 comments:

Knitting Linguist said...

Isn't it funny how those little symbols can make such a difference? And sometimes they make decisions for us... I'm looking forward to seeing the end product of the blanket (as I'm sure you are, too)!

KathyR said...

Maybe it is something in the water lately? I am so glad that I am not alone in misreading patterns - especially when they make all the difference to how the finished article can look. Your finished blanket will be bound to look splendid in the end!