The Wool Merchant's Daughter

“We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.” Remember these messages that periodically would come from your television set in the 60s and 70s? It meant that some sort of technical difficulty was experienced … like a technician had tripped over a cord and pulled it out of the outlet box … and the station had momentarily gone off the air?

Well, I had hoped to have one finished blue tweed sock by the end of the weekend. On Saturday night, after knitting the complete gusset section and getting about halfway up the foot, I realized there was a skipped stitch sticking up. And, since I couldn’t ascertain where the stitch was or if leaving it out would mean terminal damage, I skewered it with a needle and frogged out all the work I had just done, up to that point.

Turned out it was a stitch in the row just one off from the pick-up row, so I had to go back pretty far. At least I didn’t have to pick up all the new stitches again. But once I got everything back on the needles, I sort of fizzled with energy to do the same thing over again. I am about halfway through the gussets, but took a break to work on something with bigger needles and a different color. Please stand by.

This headwrap from the book, “Handmade Underground Knitwear,” taught me more about shaping with stitches than anything I can remember. It is very simple to knit, as long as you follow the directions. Being an indifferent sort of knitter, I seldom follow directions. But I did with this one and am glad – it turned out great. It is recommended for Jojoland Rhythm, which I happened to have a skein of in my stash. I wasn’t completely happy with either the color or the length, so I made a second on in Wisdoms Yarns Poems and dropped out a couple of rows.

Voila! Instead of 19 repeats on each side, I did 18 and it made the finished wrap a little tighter. I would probably do 17 on each side next time.

I think the shaping is cunning – this finally made me realize the difference between SSK and K2T. And I love the way the top comes out in half circles!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 10:02 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.