Monday, May 11, 2009

Useless knitting is better than no knitting

We went to see the Star Trek movie this weekend, and needless to say, the yarn I ordered from WEBS did not arrive in time (I'm not complaining, they are totally taking a reasonable amount of time, I just didn't think to place the order soon enough).

So here I am, with absolutely no movie-suitable knitting, and a two-hour movie, and what on earth am I going to do?

I took my swatch. I need to swatch size 8, 7, and 6 at least so before we got to the movie I switched to the 7's, purled a row, knit a row with 7 yarnovers to remind me of the needle size, purled back across that row, and I was all set up for movie knitting.

Two hour movie, and a 50-stitch square of stockinette.

Yeah. Needless to say, this swatch is of a generous size. I actually put it down towards the end of the movie because I could feel that I was going to run out of yarn and I would either have to frog some of what I was doing or start a new ball for the size 6 needles. It was actually a really difficult decision, but I kind of hate knitting with Ramen-noodle-esqe frogged yarn, so I put it down. Fortunately, it was a really great movie, so I was only midly uncomfortable without knitting.

From now on I vow to always have a reasonable weight garter or stockinette piece for movie knitting. Meanwhile, my WEBS yarn is en route, which is good, because I still want to see Monsters vs. Aliens!

In other knitting news, this weekend was really busy so I didn't get a lot done. I did, however, get a lot UNdone. I frogged the yoke of my sweater as planned. I pulled out the yarn attached to the current ball by hand. I knew there was an entire other ball of yarn that would have to be pulled out, so I went upstairs, draped the sweater over a chair, stuck the end in my ball winder and just wound it right off the sweater. Then I took the sweater downstairs and frogged what was left.

I ended up frogging all the way back to the place where I had joined the sleeve. I hadn't intended to do this, but finally decided it would be the easier than trying to figure out when I had frogged enough and where the start of the round was and all that jazz. It was only two extra rows anyway. This turned out to be a very good thing because it was actually supposed to be 4 extra rows, but I was dumb and didn't realize (don't ask me how) that there was a different number for different sizes.

I've worked on the sweater some since then but I'm really sort of slogging along at this point. I'm ready for the sweater to be done. The weather's changing and it's warming up, so I'm not feeling the drive to work on it the way I did in the cold (strange but true). Also, it's getting heavy. I tried to work on it some last night, but I was watching the Caps game and had to switch to TV knitting when I missed two out of three goals because I stopped to count.

My WEBS yarn did arrive yesterday (one day too late for the movie! doh!) and I cast on for the Three-Scarf Ruana (rav link) and used that for my hockey knitting. I'm using Valley Yarns Northampton in a nice heathered light gray. Very pretty, utterly dull - perfect. 34 inches of garter stitch before I have to think at all. (I may be less excited about that 15 inches from now, but for now - thrilled).

The colrain lace and the silk alpaca lace are both very pretty and brought me much glee. But, I am doing nothing until I finish this sweater. I think Veronique (rav link) is up next. We'll see. I may not start anything else for a while, because I'm really feeling the lace bug at the moment. I want to get MS4 off my plate so I can start Hanami before the spring/summer are totally over.

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