Saturday, February 28, 2009

This Bird has a new town!

I'm in Seattle now! Yippee! What I see from where I'm sitting:

Lake Union

Lake Union

The flight was unpleasant. I must have been delusional when I thought it would provide a good stretch of knitting time. It was the middle of the night--time for sleeping, NOT knitting. But the extended waiting time in the airport was very productive. And yet I am STILL not done with the body of this red sixteen-point tee. I feel like I'll be knitting 4x6 checkerboard stitch for the rest of my life. Ugh.

Red tee progress

When I started on the body of this sweater, I figured that it would take me 120 rows, or 10 pattern repeats, to reach the called-for 12 inches from underarm to lower hem. The finger in this picture shows the place that I should have been done.

Red tee progress

However, this was assuming that I had the correct row gauge. Apparently, my stitch gauge is about right, but my row gauge isn't. Instead of getting 10 rows/inch in checkerboard pattern, I'm getting 12 rows/inch. Which means 24 extra rows (of 2 pattern repeats) to get the required length. Ugh. I timed myself the other day and learned that I can knit one round in 5.5 minutes of intense, focused knitting. And most of my knitting time is neither intense nor focused. Leaving out the math, this boils down to a WHOLE TON of knitting time for this sweater. I think I might have to give up my hope of finishing this sweater in time for my party (which starts in about 45 min). The other issue that's facing me with this sweater is the yarn remaining to knit the sleeves. It looks like I'll be lucky to have one full ball left over for the sleeves. I really hope I get that little yarn scale I asked for from mom for xmas so that I can weight out the yarn as I'm knitting and know just I've used half of what's left.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

:) Glad I listened to the gift suggestions!