Monday 26 March 2012

Knitting nightmare

I've made a mistake....a very big mistake...and I've been trying really hard to not feel down about it all weekend. I knitted a whole sleeve wrong. Not just any sleeve...a complicated one with various increases and decreases and 3 different colours. It took me a whole week to knit that sleeve and now it needs to be pulled out! Gutted -to say the least!

The sleeve is from the little jumper I'm knitting from an old pattern and its been pretty complicated.

I think I choose a bit if a difficult one for my first project using colour fair isle stylee. Its been a bit of an emotional roller coaster since I started it. I'm knitting it in 4ply when the pattern is meant to be 3ply so I had to figure out a different size of needles to use. Then I had to work out how to fair isle knit. Then there was complicated increases so I joined a knitting group and thankfully one of my new friends was able to teach me how to accommodate for the increases and use stitch markers. Then I drew a chart to help me keep track of the pattern repeat..then I realised I had colour coded it wrong and had to take out half of a pattern repeat.



I got through it though and was making good headway. I had already done the back of the jumper and I  really wanted to push on with it as there are loads of other things I want to knit and make but I'm not keen on having too many things on the go at once.
This is the back, finally finished!

But after a week of knitting for at about 2 hours every day and then stitching in all the loose ends I compared it to my other sleeve only to find it was too dam small!!! I missed out a crucial increase row after I had done the rib which would have increased the stitches to 90 from 74. So the whole bloomin' thing was knitted on 74 stitches when it should have been 90!

But hey ho....what can you do? I still really want  to finish the thing. So I'm having a rest from it for a few days and I'll just try to forget about it...put it down to experience.

Have you ever made a big mistake when knitting up something? How did you cope?

2 comments:

  1. Pulled it out and started again.

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  2. HI Lauren

    I've been knitting shawls. Someone told me about life lines. Before you start a tricky area of pattern thread a separate piece of yarn through your stitches. Then if things go astray, you can unravel back to an area that was ok. Doesn't stop the mistakes but gives you a way back that isn't starting from scratch. Kind of a resore point but for knitting :)

    Best wishes

    Billie

    If it makes you feel any better my first cardigan was a total utter disaster and I never wore it, my next attempt at a baby cardi/jumper took 2 years! (Luckily I made it in lemon and the woman I was knitting it for had a second baby). Yours looks much better than mine ever did. Keep going, you can do it.

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