Generally I have been knitting regularly but not blogging. I have also been tired and am struggling to figure out what is what: namely when I am tired because I have done too much, when I am tired because I have done too little, and when I am tired due to the general process of healing and recovery. I am certain that sometimes I simply become frustrated and perhaps a little blue; that does nothing to speed things along.
At any rate, I did not knit for a few days the end of the week leading into Palm Sunday or the beginning of Holy Week. I was doing some sewing for the church, I hosted a dinner party, I was finishing up the back of a my summer cardigan, but I was in no rush to move onto the next step or another project.
This might have been a mistake, or perhaps it was a blessing, because the project has been half ripped out, will be ripped out completely, and is now in limbo. I don't yet feel like starting over so I am happily working on my temperature blanket, which is still running behind, currently somewhere in early February.
What happened?
Truthfully it was mostly a gauge issue. And because gauge is such an essential, and essentially simple thing, I was fairly annoyed with myself for messing it up. I had a gauge swatch that was very close to the recommended gauge for the pattern, off by less than 1/2 stitch per four inches, and I had rewritten the pattern slightly, to adapt it to some fit issues that I hoped to address. I knew that there was a potential for ripping because some of the fit issues I was addressing were things I had not yet attempted in a sweater, but knitting is pretty easy, and I wasn't really all that worried about it.
Perhaps I should have been.
I just knitted blithely along until the body of the sweater was almost finished. Then I thought I would take the sweater pieces and check them against a pattern I had drawn in order to help me visualize the shaping I wanted to add. The sweater, as knit, was much larger than the pattern, which should not have happened because I did all the math. I checked the math and the math was good.
Alas the knitting was not. My actual knitting was at a much looser gauge than the the swatch, and what was frustrating about this was that I should have anticipated the problem. I don't know if you can actually tell the difference in the photo above; I can because I know what I am looking at (the swatch is on top of the actual sweater). I should have noticed that the knitting in my lap was much more loosely knit than the swatch, and I also should have known better, given the rather serendipitous way my swatching all fell into place. Everything affects gauge, and unless I am knitting in good wool, it is rarely that simple.
First of all, I tend to be a loose knitter. I got gauge on my first attempt on needles that were very close to the recommended needle size. I used size US 10 needles and the pattern called for 10 1/2. That, in and of itself was unusual, more unusual because I was using wooden needles and I know from long experience that my stitches on wooden needles tend to be quite different than those on, let's say metal needles. Generally, when I am knitting using wooden needles my stitches are fatter and shorter than they are when I am using metal needles. This means I get fewer stitches to an inch, widthwise, and more rows to an inch lengthwise. My generally loose gauge is even looser with wood, although the stitches are sometimes so short that I actually end up needing more yarn than is specified in a pattern due to all the extra rows that will be required.
When I knit with metal needles, which are my needles of choice for most projects, I get long skinny stitches. This usually means that if I get the stitch gauge specified for a pattern, my row gauge is often off because I need fewer rows to make up an inch of length. This often works for me because I have a long torso and it is easy enough, for most sweaters, to simply recalculate the decreases as needed to fit my actual gauge.
There are times this does not work, and I have needles in various materials just to deal with the realities of the ways materials affect gauge.
I don't know why I started with wooden needles. Probably I simply had them available and visible in the sizes I was looking for. Knitting materials have not been completely unpacked and organized as of yet. I also don't know why I knit so tightly when knitting the gauge swatch, because I know I am a loose knitter, and I would think I would have been suspicious. I suspect I was just eager, and tired, and perhaps a bit overwhelmed. I knit this swatch in the period immediately following my cardioversion, a period when I was eager to start something new but when I was also always bone-tired.
It is also possible that, although the swatch did not change gauge with wet blocking, it grows with warmth. I do not actually think that is the case. If it were I would still have to knit the sweater at a smaller gauge however, simply so that it would not grow while I was wearing it.
I have ripped back about half the sweater. I stopped because I had other obligations, and then I didn't feel like returning to the project so I picked up something else. I do want to wear this cardigan though, so I will come back to it, probably after I return from a quick trip to Texas. Let's say early May.
This too shall pass.
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