The Other Important Thing To Check

I was naughty.  I didn't swatch properly for a pair of socks I started working on and it bit me in the ass.

Ok, so I'm usually naughty in this way.  Every so often I'll do a semi-proper swatch, and by a semi-proper swatch I mean I'll knit more than an inch long on a 3 to 4 inch piece before casting off. Very rarely, I'll have sufficient motivation or time to knit a proper swatch. This is usually when I'm designing, but I'll do it for other major projects where getting the size wrong is really going to ruin things.  More commonly, however, I knit a small 2" x 1" swatch, get an idea of gauge, wash it to make sure it doesn't disintegrate or grow too much, and start the project.

Of course, by half-assing it this way, you would think what bit me in the ass was the gauge.  Not so; actually the gauge is working out better than I thought it would. No, the problem was that the colors I chose for the project didn't work:

You see, in my love of dark colors, I was thinking these contrasted sufficiently enough to allow for some colorwork to be done. I explicitly bought the purple skein so that I had a color to contrast with the black.  I was so confident, I barely did any colorwork in my swatch:

Which is why I ignored the fact that you can barely see that I did any colorwork in the swatch, and went on my merry way of casting on.

By the time I finished the first colorwork segment, however, it became obvious.  You couldn't see the pattern at all.  If I was just making a striped sock, it would have worked ok enough, but that first colorwork section wasn't even the biggest and therefore I said screw it and ripped the sock back out to the toe section.  I then went statch diving and found this fingering weight yarn:

 I was hoping to use this for something like a Hitchhiker, but I was already committed to the sock pattern and this was the only yarn I found light enough to work with the black for the colorwork.  To be fair, it is coming out nicely (despite the fact that I had to pretty much write the heel directions myself since they didn't exist in the pattern):

Pattern is Vellamo by Taina Anttila

I guess the other lesson here is have a good stash.  Not that I need to tell most yarn-crafters that.

The Only Thing I've Accomplished

I may have gotten little accomplished otherwise, but in the past week I've seemed to have gotten a lot of knitting done while everything went to shit. Well, ok, I also got my car back to street legal in the same time period, but the knitting didn't cost me $670 either.

You know what...I take my surprise back.  As I worked furiously on this hat:

Pattern here

and this cowl:

I start with this pattern, but I always add 20 stitches.  Honestly, there's a bunch of similar patters on Ravelry...it's basic seed stitch in-the-round.

and this hat:

My own pattern...may write it up quick and dirty and release it as a free one...we'll see.

and started these things:

and messing around trying to plan a slightly more complicated pattern, I wondered to myself why I suddenly got more productive.  How did I finish a double layer color-work hat in four days, and a single layer one in the same amount of time (and the single layer one took that long only because that was my third attempt and I made up the pattern)?  Ok, sure, I did take two hour long trips on a bus and have to wait an hour dealing with my car, but that's not the complete story.

The complete story is that because things hit a iffy point elsewhere, I got more productive.  You see, yarn crafting is my crutch.  It's the one thing that, even when I want to throw it across the room, I'm still more successful in than anything else.  Because when I can't move forward and Murphy's Law is in play, I can usually still successfully make a hat.  A color-work hat (thanks to my knitting group for turning me onto that obsession at the moment...the first hat was one of our KAL choices).  A double-sided color-work hat with humping reindeer on the inside:

In which I can sub DK weight in for worsted and only screw up the math (because where was I when I thought 32 went into 112?) , and aggressively block it because it's still small and...it fits.  Mostly. And if I really do screw up, it's just yarn, and you can just rip it out. It won't screw me over irreparably or have legal ramifications. It can be annoying but not as annoying as some other things I have to deal with.

Sometimes, that makes all the difference.

P.S.: My mom's sweater, while still damp when I took it with me, did survive the trip and was dry enough to give her that night. My sister's socks fit her, and she was so busy talking about how she loved socks that my mom had to remind her why this was her first knitted pair.  I think I may be able to get away with sock weight yarn next time...