Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Aidez-moi!

Some things are bigger than what I can do.
Such as counting.
Or math.
Math is hard, and it involves a lot of counting.
Or is that really arithmetic.
I'm sure there's a difference.
Knitting lace patterns involves a lot of math simple arithmetic.
And sometimes these highly-involved patterns contain errors.
If you find a pattern without errors, however, and then an error occurs, whom can you blame?
Only yourself.
So that would be.... me, right?
Presenting.....my non-error free Freya shawl.
 As you can see, I haven't gotten very far into the shawl.
What you don't know is that this is the third time I've gotten to this point.
This time around I made an effort to be very conscientious of every stitch, and yet I still have one extra on row 16.
I don't mind ripping back at this point, but it's those dang SSK's that create problems for me.
I'm challenged that way.
Has anyone made this shawl?
It seems simple enough, but for some reason I've made mistakes each time, and really a lot of that has to do with the stitch count.
What kills me about the pattern is that about halfway through the directions state, and I quote:
 **If you aren’t counting stitches anymore because you’ve grasped the pattern, do count them every few rows. At this point it is easy to miss a YO or somehow end up with too many stitches which can get magnified as you go on and is really hard to repair if it’s gone on for too long! If you find your stitch count off, don’t despair! You can easily fudge this pattern so it looks good to all but the most discerning eye. For too many stitches, in the S2K1psso, you can slip 3 instead of two to eat an extra stitch. For too few, you can do a K2TOG instead of the S2K1psso at the end of the repeat to create a stitch for the next row.
Well those are very good instructions, but my problem is I'm not good at arithmetic, so I would love to find someone who has done a stitch count for each row on this pattern so that I know exactly where I'm supposed to be at all times.
This is a lovely shawl, and I have some great yarn that I"m using, and I would like to finish it, but if I can't even watch a program and knit a simple shawl without losing count, I might as well go back to knitting hats.
I have arrived at one solution, and I do welcome others, but I think I might unknit this row, pull out stitch markers and place them at the start of each pattern repeat so that I can check them at the end of the row.
I mean really, I'm up to like 89 stitches now, and only on row 16 what am I going to do when there are over 200 stitches on my needles?
By the way, the money in that photo should not be considered a bribe, but hey, if giving away a buck will get someone to help me out, have at it.
And speaking of Freya, Norse mythology, and the like, here's a song by one of my favorite bands performing one of my favorite songs:

1 comment:

charlotte said...

I'm not counting but it look good from here! I'm completeley with you on the knitting and counting I like the long knit contiously for 20cm kind of instruction!