June 10, 2018

Follow Instructions? Never!

So it turns out that I fail at following knitting instructions.  Despite the fact that I wrote said knitting instructions.  Why, yes, I may have had to just rip out a whole weekend's worth of work because I forgot to increase in one location.

Since this is a pattern I am eventually planning to write up and most likely sell, I won't show you much, but here's a teaser (after I ripped out most of it):



What makes this even more...well, I guess what makes it make more sense is that this is the second reproduction of this pattern. Story goes like this:

  1. My sister is having (now has) another kid.  It's going to be another girl. Yay, make all the things with the yarn I got on the NYC Yarn Crawl because I got suspicious and so bought baby-appropriate yarn.
  2. Start a blanket with yarn I had from last baby making spree, pick all the patterns out for all the yarn I can think of.
  3. Promptly get nothing done because get assigned insane work project in the middle of capstone project for grad school.
  4. Hit winter break, go on vacation to Iceland (was awesome), get one sweater done for baby over vacation.
  5. Realize that all the yarn I bought is wool and baby is due in spring.
  6. Find out WEBS is having a sale.
  7. Find out nice colored cotton yarn is on sale as well.
  8. I can do matching dresses in two different colors of this yarn for both my nieces, right?
  9. Realize I don't like any of the patterns again for the style of dress I like to give kids.
  10. Make up the pattern by coming up with the start, getting half way through the top, deciding I don't like my plan, futzing around until it works out, quickly scrap write it down with calculations, and continue knitting body of dress.
  11. Start grad school again. Tons of schoolwork this semester again. Get to work all the hours again because nor'easters. Knitting? What's that?
  12. Realize baby is due in a week.
  13. Quickly finish up dress, writing rest down on paper.
  14. Baby born, yay! Realize I am not going to see baby until I'm out of school, damnit.
  15. Finish grad school. Get to work two nights right after. Somehow finish baby blanket same time.
  16. Get to see sister and nieces. Give the sad pile of stuff I actually got done to sister. I tell her 'I'm going to make this dress for the other niece', and she goes 'the dress you made her before still fits. It actually fits both of them.' I think 'going to do it anyway; need to test pattern'.
  17. Clean up notes made before, print them out, and start second dress.
  18. Don't actually read notes carefully because I think 'ah, I see what I did here' and forget to do one increase, which screws up the whole pattern.

And here we are. Back to almost the beginning because I missed one last increase needed for the pattern to work.

Oh well. At least I have time to knit again.

So this was just the last year's worth of crap going on that lead me to end up abandoning the blog for...two years, yikes!.  Grad school is completely done, work is ok at the moment, and everything else is not where I thought I would be when life went crazy, but it's now stable, so I should be getting back into the swing of things now. There's a lot of catching up to do so I may not get there right away, but I'll try to start blogging my mishaps and future projects again.  There should be a number of those shortly.