A Day to Frog

March 8th, 2009

Two projects I had to frog today, but I feel good about doing it for both of them. Maybe it’s the sun and warm spring weather we’re having, or maybe it’s these projects feel fresh because they’ve spent a lot of time in hibernation. As long as I don’t have to do too much more ripping back on these, I’m happy to do it now.

This is my second piece on the sweater I’ve been working on, and hopefully this isn’t a warning of things to come as in the previous piece. I got over halfway through knitting it before I had to rip anything back, which is a good sign. I was being pretty careful about the pattern, and following my rows cautiously when I realized there was one measely increase that I missed on the outside edge of the garter panel. Whoops! A roughly 10 row frog isn’t so bad compared to the rip-it hell of the first piece.

Compared to my slow progress before, I feel like I’m flying along on this piece despite the small stitches. Just a back piece, and two sleeves to go! Then there’s the grafting, seaming…OK maybe it’s not quite that close to finished.

I realize you haven’t seen much of this guy since before the fall. I didn’t really post anything after the swatch, but you can see it’s coming along. I haven’t touched it since before the holidays, but it was a well deserved break. At that point I had finished one sleeve (which you see above), and started the other when I realized my gauge on the sleeves was off. I probably could have fudged it, but it was just a teeny bit too tight on my husband’s arm. Since it’s been over a month I feel pretty comfortable starting all over on the sleeves.

I must say, this has been super easy and when I actually work on it, it flies off the needles. No waist shaping and a wonderful combination of garter/stockinette stitch. Such a contrast to the sage cardigan! Not only can we women be high maintenance sometimes, but I guess our sweaters are too.

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Teddy Bears

March 1st, 2009

A few months back I bought this cute little book of knitted teddy bears called The Knitted Teddy Bear. I love knitting things that are going to be useful, and I just can’t bring myself to knit all kinds of baby clothes that the little one will grow out of in a few months. However, a teddy bear can be of use for a very long time.

I had some Frog Tree Alpaca sport weight leftover from knitting Mom’s shawl, browsed through the book for the right teddy, and cast-on…again…and again… This is not a cleverly knit-in-one-piece-and-sew-closed teddy bear. Normally I avoid heavily seamed pieces whenever I can because, well frankly if you can then why not? I started losing track of what was what so I had to pin my finished pieces to a piece of paper and label them.

It looks like a mess right now, but just bear with me (pun not intended…I wish I was that clever). Once all the pieces are sewn up and the ends are all hidden away it’ll be a cute little brown bear of a thing. It’s going to be a bit on the small side, but I kind of like that. Toys don’t always need to be huge.

A bit on this particular pattern book. There are quite a few cute little bear patterns in it, and I imagine once you’ve done a few you get the hang of it. It has a nice variety to choose from, but the way the patterns are written can be wierd. It’s not wrong necessarily, but it took me a little bit to decipher some of the wording. For example…

Inc 1 st at each end of row.

When I first looked at that sentence, I thought it was telling me to increase at the end of each row. I began to wonder if this wasn’t written by a native English speaker, because that didn’t make sense based on previous rows. After a few more readings though, I realized that it meant to increase at the beginning and end of that particular row (or “at each end”). Not that this is a wrong way to describe what you’re doing, but in my experience it’s much more  common to see that written as something like “m1 at beg. and end of row” replacing m1 with whatever increase is being used of course.

So far this is a very thorough pattern. We’ll see when it comes to construction how the instructions are.

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