Monday, April 23, 2007

Goof-up

I made a lot of progress on the chenille scarf, but I also realized that I have been working the pattern totally wrong on both of my scarves. I did not think to account for the fact that when you go to the next row, you have to turn the work in your hand, so everything you just knitted becomes a purl and everything you just purled becomes a knit. So instead of a 4x4 ribbed scarf and a seed stitch scarf...I have a scarf knitted in alternating 4x4 blocks of garter stitch and a 1x1 ribbed scarf, respectively. GAAH. -_- They both LOOK fine, they just don't look like they are SUPPOSED to look. But now I'm confused - how do I know if I have to reverse every other line of a pattern or not? Not very many of them seem to explicitly mark their first couple lines for "right side" or "wrong side."

I was especially miffed at the Stitch-and-Bitch book, which I've been really satisfied with so far, because their instructions for doing a rib stitch DO account for this, but their instructions for a seed stitch DON'T. And they haven't, anywhere that I have found, discussed the issue in such a way that you would know to look for it in either set of instructions. :oP It took Sbodd and me and google all together a good ten minutes of confused discussion to agree that yes, I was in fact doing the seed stitch wrong. I feel a little dumb about the rib stitch because I could've figured that one out, since it was very clear that my scarf did not look like the example in the picture, but the seed stitch was just darn confusing, since the fuzzyness and shinyness of the chenille made it hard to figure out whether I was doing something wrong.

However, I have about a foot of that scarf knitted and it looks lovely as a 1x1 rib anyway, so I'm trying not to be too fussed about it. But darn, it annoys me that I was merrily doing the wrong thing all this time!

No comments: