Knitwith Homespun

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I have a cold.  I haven’t been blogging.  I have sciatica.  But I never stopped knitting on Charlotte’s Web.  One month from when I started I am done and it’s blocking in the yard.  I must be silly to think I could block this in the house anywhere.  It’s gigantic!   I was inspired by the version made by Turtlegirl and wanted to try it.  I thought the size of it and the color variations she chose really made it look like a fun knit.  I had quite a few problems at first but I really had plenty of time to work them out.

Any of you mom’s out there might understand this, but I was so frustrated in the beginning while knitting this.  It reminded me of when Bella was a baby and I was exhausted but she wouldn’t nap or sleep.  Remember that feeling?  Nothing you can do but you know she NEEDS to sleep and so do you but neither is happening?  Well once I remember this, I would frog back without frustration or anger and just reknit.  It was completely worth it.  There was nothing I could do anyway so I might as well get it right, right?  Do you want a huge glaring error in your beautiful first shawl?  I sure don’t!  Once I stopped being upset and frustrated, it all went really well.  I knit like a fiend and I loved every minute of it.  I will do it again and I have some ideas for colors already in my head.  It’s just a matter of collecting them appropriately.

I really love how the colors look together.  My friends and family were all concerned with the pink and it’s stark nature next to the other colors.  I really liked that part of the color play.  I thought since the top had a stark contrast with the wasabi color that I should finish off in a similar contrast and stark nature.  I think it works.  I can’t wait to wear this somewhere.  I never realized before how perfect California is for shawls because the temperature always dips down when the sun goes down.

I don’t see any glaring errors yet.  I didn’t do the edging the way the pattern says but I did go pretty close.  My crocheting is very weak so I kinda faked it.  I like how it looks though and I won’t add fringe.  I used the same chart as Turtlegirl and the size is quite similar but I will measure and edit this post with the information.  I will post this Charlotte’s Web in my personal record books as a success and a blast!

Anyone who reads my blog knows I am now knitting Charlotte’s Web Shawl.  This is my first lace project and I am enjoying it so much.  I have had a few hiccups and frogged the whole thing once but I still love it.  I thought I would document my method for keeping the lace repeats straight without using stitch markers.  There are just too many repeats and I totally don’t want to mess with stinkin stitch markers all the way across 300 some stitches (about where I am now).  First, here is a photo of my entire progress so far.  I am about to start row 153 which is row 7 of the pattern.

Here is a photo to show the row numbers.  The pattern is repeated twice before anything changes.  The triangles of stockinette are shown pretty clearly in the chart so I won’t explain those. I am hoping that as I explain, you can understand what I mean. First, as I have blogged or plurked this shawl, I have jinxed myself every time. I am hoping to break that habit here and now. The first row of the pattern has the fewest yarn overs. There are just two yarn overs which makes this row the least repetitive. However, it can be easy to remember what you are doing. Every time you do a regular knit stitch here, you will be making a stockinette row. You will be able to tell when you are knitting if you are knitting into a yarn over or a stockinette stitch. If your knit (as opposed to a slip-knit-pass or knit-two-together) stitch is into a yarn over, you have done something wrong. Once you are finished with the lace repeat, you will knit three stitches and then start the next lace repeat. These three stitches are a YO, stockinette, YO in that order. If you don’t come across them this way, you have done something wrong. It should be easy to go back and figure out your error if you follow this pattern.

I haven’t counted my stitches since row 138 and I am about to start row 153.  I am confident I don’t need to count but I sure needed to do it up until this time.  Here is what I learned about that.  If you have two many stitches, you probably forgot to pass one of your stitches over your knitted stitch.  If you have two few stitches, but your stitches worked out the way they were supposed to in the row (i.e. you finished with your proper number of stockinette for the edge triangles) then you probably missed a yarn over.  You should be able to look at your stitches and easily know where a yarn over belongs but is missing.  If all else fails, go back to your lifeline rows and start again.

The eight stitch lace repeat can be found between the stockinette rows shown here by the red lines.  If you lay the shawl down, you can easily see these raised rows in your shawl.  This is where I ran into a problem that I blogged about earlier. This little tip can also help you figure out where you are in your repeats.

All even numbered rows are purling back over the entire length of the shawl so I won’t talk about those rows. Row 3 of the lace is kinda fun. The knit stitches are the same as the first row. By that I mean that they should all remain stockinette and not be done into a YO. Between each of the stitch repeats is a yarn over so it’s quite repetitive and should be mindless. This can also help you when you are checking your work. Remember the stitches look like a single stitch, a slip-knit-pass, (I call this a double because it looks like two stitches knit together), a slip-k2tog-pass (triple), K2tog (double), and then a single again because you are at the end and have your stockinette row. So it goes, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1 like that. If you are trying to find an error, you may miss your stockinette which is easy to spot. A mistake I made a lot was to skip the slip-knit-pass and go right to the slip-k2tog-pass so I could spot that too.

The 5th and 7th rows are the same and my favorite.  Very simply it is slip-k2tog-pass, yo, K1 until the last stockinette triangle.  Super easy to knit and to check because it is very symetrical.  The K1 is like the previous rows and continues a stockinette stitch.  Sometimes it’s not a row all the way up from the center, but it’s not a yarn over either.  Easy to check and see an error.

Well I hope this has been helpful to anyone who is interested.  It took me quite a while to see these patterns and repeats myself and I hope it can be helpful and understood by someone else.  Otherwise I will just refer back to it when I knit my next Charlotte’s Web (and I will knit another).  I am very excited to finish this and I am super obsessed!

This is an excellent example of this phrase. Here I am knitting away on my Charlotte’s web and really enjoying the repetitiveness of this pattern.  I am well into the second color and about to go full time to the third color.  That would happen at row 107.  I starting knitting that row.  I get to the center of the shawl and it doesn’t work.  I frog back to the beginning of the row and start again.  No go.  I look very carefully at each of the stitches and try to see where my error is.  I have been doing this all along and sometimes I can see my error in the stitches.  I am looking closely at the knitting and watching each stitch to see where I have gone wrong.  No luck.  So I frog way back to my lifeline at row 102.  I knit the next row (103) and purl back.  I have the wrong stitch count.  There should be 211 stitches and I have 212.  Please also note that this count took about an hour with two kids around.  Frogging back to the lifeline again.  Knit the pattern and purl.  212.  WTF?  I frog back to the lifeline and 207 stitches (the correct count).  I don’t understand.  So I am very obsessed with correcting this and knitting my huge ass off and I can’t figure out what’s wrong.  I take the shawl to bed to look and examine and figure it out.  I lay it out on the bed and look at it.  The picture above shows what I saw.

You can see in this picture as well what I am referring to. If you look at the stitches moving along the centers of the pattern.  There is a row going from the flat edge to each of the triangle edges of stockinette that should go all the way from edge to edge.  As you can see in this picture, it’s not doing that.  There is a clear distinction of where that stockinette row stops.  Lucky for me, I have a lifeline right at that spot.  So, looking so closely at the stitches wouldn’t let me see where I had a problem.  Backing up and looking at the entire shawl is where the correction can be seen.  It’s a very powerful lesson and not so entirely painful.  I am glad I have my lifelines.  I am glad I labeled them with the row numbers.  I am sad I have to frog back 13 rows of a very fun shawl to knit.  However, two lifelines at a time really saved my life this time.  Thank you thank you thank you!

Here is the sad sad picture to display how far back I have to frog. The frogging will be easy, but it will hurt. Can I get back to where I was, row 107, quickly? I sure hope so. Will it correct my problems? I hope so. I’ll keep you posted.

I am obsessed! Honestly this is making me crazy. First, this is really fun to knit. It’s easy to remember the patterns and the chart that Chrisi left for me to use makes everything easier. I keep the printed chart that Cristi left on her blog for the size and the chart for the pattern with me. That’s all I look at. I have put the book away! The only problem I have is sometimes my stitch count is off and I have to frog back a row or two. I have made that easier on myself by inserting these strings with the row numbers on them. I figured this out the hard way. I had inserted the string at row 24 first and then I got to the second set of two rows of color 2 and lost track of my place in the pattern. I couldn’t get the stitch count to match up properly so I had to frog back. Well I had gotten all cocky and removed the string a few rows back and had nothing to mark my spots. In a pattern like this, I couldn’t just remove the needle stitch by stitch because of all the yarn overs and k2tog and skp stitches. It was far too confusing. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. This is why I now have two strings. I remove the oldest one first and replace it in the newest complete row that I know is correct. I will always have two except when I am placing a new one. I have used it twice already and it has made my life SO much easier.

Next, I was worried about my color choices. I tend to opt toward the unconventional color matches. I was a bit worried after I got home and looked at my colors. I thought maybe they didn’t really all work together but I really am liking how these two colors are playing together right now. The next color I will add is purple and that should work fine. I’ll keep y’all posted on my progress.

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your weekend!

Well I don’t know what you did, but I know what I did.  I was so busy yesterday for a day off.  We went swimming, I knit a bunch on my Charlotte’s web, I started a new project, and I went to a movie!

First, Christine, my niece, came over for the day.  Her parents and brother had orientation at Cal Poly Pomona for the entire day.  This is what gave me the day off.  I didn’t have to entertain my daughter at all cause she had a cousin to play with.  Sometime in the morning, my sister-in-law called (a different one than Christine’s mom) and she offered for us to come over and hang by the pool.  Great idea!  Cathy was set to babysit Bella when David and I went to a movie later in the evening so I packed up some clothes and stuff just in case Bella stayed there for the day (just in case )  I took Charlotte’s web with me and worked on it at the pool while the girls were swimming.

The movie we went to was called Long Way Down.  This is a sequel to the TV show, Long Way Round wherein Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman rode BMW motorcycles from London through Europe and China the long way around to New York City.  That was a fabulous show.  Long Way Down is the same crew and cast going from John O’Groats, Scotland down to Capetown, South Africa.  The movie is a condensed version of the TV show that began airing last night on Fox Reality Network for 10 weeks.  Please tune in cause it’s an awesome show.  David is the general manager for a BMW motorcycle dealership and the dealership sponsored the movie at the local Stadium 25 theater and bought 100 tickets to the show.  They gave away tickets to anyone who made a donation to the Pediatric Brain Tumor foundation.

The entire shop went to the movie and unfortunately for us, it was month end for David and he couldn’t leave the shop until the month was closed out in the computer.  We didn’t get to go to dinner with everyone but we did make it to the movie on time.  It was a great great show.  They completely condensed the show into a 2 hour movie.  There are a lot of placs they visited but the funniest thing was when Ewan and Charley went to the set of Star Wars in Africa (I forget the country) but there are posters of the later movies with Ewan on them.  Noone recognized him while he was there.  Hysterical!  I can’t wait to watch the entire series on Fox.

While at the movie, I wanted to knit cause I thought that would be a great idea.  Well, I couldn’t take Charlotte’s web cause that would be crazy in the movie theater.  I started a new multi-directional scarf and it worked very well for the theater and here’s what I got done.  Thanks Adrian, for dying the lovely yarn I am using for this scarf in this beautiful colorway.  When I was taking this picture, the scarf was on the counter with a mango and I thought the colors were exactly matched.  See?