Ripping yarns...

Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.

I got to this point on my Clapotis and was knitting merrily along when it occurred to me that I'd used up nearly 2/3 of my yarn and was just hitting the halfway point on the shawl. Er, oops.

Well, it's true that I'd done one more 12-row repeat on the increase rows than specified. Someone else had done Clapotis from Sundara's DK Silky Merino, and they said that they'd made it a bit wider, so I thought I could, too. But I couldn't quite figure out how to do it in less than a 12-row repeat.

I think that was too much. At the rate I'm going, this shawl will be too short to wrap around me. That is pretty much useless. I will need to try to reinsert a needle 12 rows short of the corner, and rip back more than half of what I've knit on this puppy. Poop.

So I was sad, so I got out Picovoli and tried to pin out the excess underarm stitches to see how many there were. If it had been 6 or 7 per underarm, I'd have ripped back and cast on fewer and kept going.



But no. It was HALF of the underarm stitches. Half. Now that is just wrong.

To make this yarn work, I'd have to start over and cast on for the next size down. That seems crazy, because now I'm about 8 inches down from my normal size, but I think that also I'm ending up at a 4.5 spi gauge instead of 5.5.

Since I actually don't really even precisely want Picovoli, but a short-sleeved top, I might just try to take the gauge I have and size I want and make a generic raglan T.

So of course, instead of either of these things, or getting back to another half-done project, I cast on for something new — a baby sweater. Small problem: Valerie has not had much experience with charted patterns, and forgot that on back-and-forth knitting you have to read the even rows left-to-right. (Not only that, my gauge was way off and at this rate I'd run out of yarn.)

Yep, you guessed it: I ripped back the dozen rows I'd knit and cast on again with smaller needles. This time for sure, Bullwinkle!

Not so much. This time I forgot that since the previous row ends mid-chart, the return row has to start mid-chart.