Sometimes the zebras choose a pattern based on how complex, challenging or curious it is: some serious obstacles, others real snoozey, when-will-it-end-knits. It all depends on what the zebras think will be funnier to watch. If they’re feeling a bit ashamed of fucking about with me, they’ll pick out socks or washcloths or something else soothing, but that’s just to keep me guessing. Sometimes they choose the pattern based on what they think my wardrobe is lacking.  They spend far too much time discussing the deficiencies of my wardrobe, to be honest.

Anyway, I finished Mossy Tendrils last night, and I think the zebras might be on to something. This is definitely something my wardrobe lacked and I was really eager to have it on me.

Tendrilly sleeve detail

Yarn: Bendigo Classic 8ply in Mallard (MALLARD!) – just shy of two 200g balls, so about 800m.

Pattern: Baby Cables and Big Ones Too (size S)

Mossy Tendrils and me, just hanging out at the table

Needles: 4.5mm all the way!  Want a quick insight into how petty the zebras are with knitting patterns? They really hate patterns that involve switching needle size after the hem or cuffs — they say I never remember to switch and end up with one smaller sleeve or something like that. They’re so judgmental.

I know everyone says that swatches lie, but I’m not sure mine did — I think I just ignored the truthful bits it was telling me.  I swatched — I’ve got evidence of it, because I leave my swatches attached to the ball until the end of the project, in case I need to harvest the yarn for seaming or whatever — and the swatch gave me gauge on 4.5mm needles.  But I had a little nagging voice, too small to be a zebra, that I should go down to 4mm needles, which completely ignored.  So the gauge is looser over the whole top, making it bigger than I wanted originally, but I think it still works.  I’m still in the honeymoon phase, so it may turn out that, in a week or so, I’m annoyed and fed up and itching to unravel it, but right now, I like it.  Nice pick, zebras: what have you got lined up for me next?

Knitting

Had hoped to finish:

- Skew socks: DONE! Woo! Prompted me to renew my hope that all the other stuff would miraculously be done.

- Silver sands scarf and matching mitts: probably would have finished if I hadn’t gotten past the thumbhole of the second mitt and realised that I had written down the instructions with all the accuracy of a giddy koala and had to rip back nearly an entire mitt and restart.  Have since finished both mitts, although the scarf is still on the needles. But seriously, only a few rows left, I swear!

- Mermaid gloves: Nope. Didn’t even pick them up.

- Mossy Tendrils: *ironic braying laughter* Snork. Ah, you slay me. Finish all the above AND a sweater, however advanced in progress? Pah.

Reading

I feel like I made better progress with the reading frenzy than the knitting one. I think it’s because I can take reading to work and read in lulls or lunchbreaks; whereas bringing my knitting to work puts me on the edge of a rabbit’s hole of lost time and potential reprimands.  But, sadly, it was not to be. I was toying with waxing lyrical about how reading is an activity that deserves respectful patience and should not be bound by reading deadlines etc.: but frankly, any student up to their nipples in “Write 2,000 words on Great Expectations by next week” could tell you that, and I suspect I was just using it as a justification for my complete failure to meet my own deadline.  And ya know what? I don’t care that much.

So where does that leave you now, smarty-pants?

Knitting list:
- Mossy tendrils — found the bag, found the pattern, found my mojo: full steam ahead.  Mind you, full steam ahead on a sweater is still round-and-round-we-go-when-does-the-stockinette-end, but I’m definitely past the waist and hip shaping, so it’s just a little burst to the end of the body and then on with the sleeves.

- Silver sands — exciting developments! Stay tuned!

- Mermaid gloves — no progress. Hands have been cold lately, though, so maybe that will be enough to jumpstart me.

Reading list:
Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
Things I Learned From Knitting
A Room of One’s Own
Five Quarters of the Orange
Tempests After Shakespeare
Sexual Personae

These, I emphasise, are only the ones I’ve started reading recently. If I were to do a true-and-honest list, taking stock of every book that currently has a bookmark of mine in it, well, I would probably have to go and lie down or quit my job or something (Scene: I ring early Monday morning: “No, I won’t be in this week, either…I found out I never finished reading The Name of the Rose two years ago. Who’d'a thought? Anyway, I’ll call you when I get to the end, okay?” Fade out to sound of ruffling pages.)

Skew — One down, one to go: still looking awesome, still blowing my mind.  Still in a plastic bag stuffed down one side of the knitting basket/end-of-day-jumper-receptacle in my room.  These socks rock and I genuinely want the finished product on my feet, ASAP, but — well, there’s no but. I got distracted, put them to one side and haven’t finished.  No excuses: let’s get ‘em done.

Mossy tendrils — slow and steady progress, which is deeply uninteresting in terms of blog posts.  There’s only so many photos of dark green stockinette waist shaping I can justify.  I’m out of the shaping woods now, and have just a little plain stockinette, followed by the garter hem, to go on the body, and then it’s sleeve city. I love top-down raglans.  I am a happy citizen of Topdown Ragland!  The best part is, this is a good nibble project: stitch away while you’re waiting for dinner, squeeze in a couple of rounds while you’re chatting or watching TV — being mostly stockinette and garter, I can even work on it while I’m reading one of the many books on The Other List: so efficient! This is the only project on this list that could not have the word “languishing” used in its discussion — I haven’t rushed it, but I haven’t dawdled, either. Just whittled away, knit by knit.

Silver sands — scarf nearly done, thanks to a day of anxious waiting at the hospital a couple of weeks ago.  Unfortunately, and without having foreseen this self-imposed deadline thing, I promised the recipient of Silver Sands a matching pair of wrist warmers.  Seemed like a good idea at the time: now it feels like another thing on the Finish It Before The Move list.  Which it totally is, so at least it’s honest.  Cast on the cuffs last night, and had about three false starts before I finally got going on a size and structure I really like.  Now to persuade myself that I can “roar” through them and get the mitts done to match the scarf in short order; I’ve already started asking myself how long I think it takes to make a pair of wrist warmers, and the level of optimism implicit in my answers varies according to mood and weather.  Just after I’ve had coffee, I’ll say it’ll only take me a weekend, max, to do them; ask me again mid-afternoon and I’ll say it takes weeks and I was a fool, A FOOL, to have even started them. (I am decidedly less rosy and more sleepy mid-afternoon.) The scarf hasn’t been bound off yet, because I suspect I’ll have a bit of leftover yarn when I’ve finished the mitts and I will use that up as the last bit of the scarf.

See, when I decided to set out this list, I was all bouncy and thinking “Hey, this deadline stuff is great: what a good motivator for getting through all those UFOs!” but now I’m getting a bit uneasy about how much I may have signed myself up for here.

Mermaid gloves — sweet cheeses, I had forgotten about these. I cast these on in summer, determined to have them finished before the cold weather came.  One’s done, the other is lingering: I’m not even sure where I’m up to in the chart.  Actually, that’s probably what has triggered the lingering.  The figuring.  The figuring was the lingering triggering! I’ve put these down at one point, forgotten where I was up to, and decided the slight increase in mental challenge created by having to work it out is sufficient justification to put them aside.

I think that’s what appeals to me so much about this kind of deadline thing: a lot of these unfinished projects are unfinished because there was something that distracted me.  Nearly all of them have been paused, usually out of a slight increase in challenge, just long enough for a new project to elbow its way into my life. Silver sands was paused because I had to find/create a wrist warmer pattern; Skew and the Mermaid loves were paused because I had forgotten where I was up to in their patterns. Now that I’m forcing myself to finish things up and not permitting new projects into the arena (KNITTING PATTERN LOCKDOWN!), I’m realising that the challenges that present potential sticking points are very rarely worth sticking on.  That’s a bit embarrassing.  Huh.  I’m actually just easily put off.  Look, I didn’t sign up to this challenge to learn stuff about myself, okay? Certainly not embarrassing stuff.  Geez, get off my back!

I love this picture.

I have just cast on Baby Cables and Big Ones Too because it is incredibly sexy and funky and a new jumper and I need all those things.  It’s a pretty straightforward pattern, once you’ve read it through and grokked it: a simple top-down raglan, with a garter-stitch yoke and garter stitch on the lower halves of the sleeves.  There’s a few cable patterns to work into the yoke as you go, which are so awesome.  (Did you click that link yet? Here it is again: go, look, admire!) And so you proceed.

Unless you’re me. Then you cock up.  Some background: I bought this pattern the same day I cast on my Silver Cruelty skirt and, recognising my fickle tendencies, realised I wouldn’t finish the skirt if I let myself cast on Baby Cables and Big Ones Too right away (I’m going to have to think of a better project name for that) so I vowed to hold off until I finished the skirt.  Then I got sick and finishing the skirt became a huge superstition: I would know I was Not Sick Anymore once the skirt was done. I got better, the skirt was done, so I cast on the sweater; and man, I’m glad I didn’t cast it on when I was sick because I’ve already arsed it up in three spectacularly amateurish ways. I don’t think I would have coped with it at all while I was sick and in a fog of knitting shopping bags.  I’ve been knitting for a bit now and I can’t believe I’m making these sorts of errors in a straightforward top-down raglan.

n00b error one: twisted the cast on.  Yup. Moving on.

n00b error two: Have a peep:

In the midst of garter we have a whole section of stockinette.  I’m not sure what happened, but I lost my mind between two stitch markers and worked a whole lotta stockinette.  Since the only thing it needed was for that middle knit round to be turned into a purl round to make it good and garterry, I just dropped each stitch down as I came to it, picked it back up in the correct fashion, and carried on with my life.

n00b error three: Oooh, boy. Perhaps the worst fixable error: a miscrossed cable. And a bunch of purls that should have been knits. Oy, a mess.  (For what it’s worth, I apologise in advance for the photography — between the cables, the garter stitch, the crepe yarn and my own Vegemite-smeared-thumbs, it’s like a perfect storm of a challenging photography situation). So I’ve drawn some handy guides:

The purple lines indicate how the cable should look.  The yellow lines indicate what has actually taken place.  The blue line shows where the rogue purl stitches have snuck in. The red cross shows badness.  Once I noticed, I spent a lot of time smoothing it with my hand and squinting and telling myself nobody would notice…but I had to fix it.  A while ago, the Yarn Harlot had a great tutorial on fixing this very situation. If I’m going to make an error like a n00b, I’m going to fix it like a l33t. Unravelled that cable section down to the error, and slowly worked it back up on DPNs, using the strands of yarn at the back.  It was slow and took focus, but dudes, it was worth it.  The hardest part was making sure I was using the correct strand each time — I had to restart a couple of times until I got into the swing of checking every single row. But I did it.

Here you can see, in sunny, cheerful, congratulatory yellow, that the path the cables should follow and the path the cables actually follow are one and the same!  The green tick shows goodness.

Feels plenty fine, yessir. I found an error, a bad one, a n00b one, and completely fixed it.  I felt pretty damn smug, I have to admit, and I would like to assert that making n00b errors doesn’t preclude you from being l33t: it’s how you fix the errors that really shows your stripes.

I think I’ll call this the Mossy Tendrils sweater: the green, the garter, the cables — it all looks very moss and tendrils to my twitchy brain.