Murphy's Law

For those that aren't aware, over the past week and a half, I've been learning to knit. My main tutors are "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Knitting and Crocheting" and the website www.knittinghelp.com (a website that provides clear videos with audio explanations) - the two resources aren't made to go together as such, but complement each other remarkably well. Now, before anyone gets any false impressions, I do have a support network of such in 'real life' as well - and to be honest, I don't think I ever would have entirely understood the whole process of knitting had I not been shown, in person, the basic knit stitch.

Now, I'd love to tell you about the whole process - from figuring out the basic tools required and what makes a good / crappy yarn, to the frustrating process of learning to cast-on, to my trial and error with several different styles of actually knitting. While it does make for an interesting story, I've told it several times now - and I'm finding that unless one is speaking to a fellow knitter, one might as well not bother. Thus, as I like to think that people actually read this blog (and I want to keep them doing so!) I'll keep to the general story, rather than going technical, to save losing people from boredom.

Suffice to say, that after a week and a half of learning - including several intentional practice swatches, and one unintentional complete restart of my first actual project, I had managed to progress approximately 27 inches into my first 'real' project, what will eventually be a 60 inch long scarf, a pattern found on a website, that's both relatively simple and still fairly attractive. At this point, my skein of yarn was running out. I'd purchased several skeins of the yarn when I bought it, so having more yarn wasn't an issue thanks to my forward thinking. However, joining up two skeins of yarn was something I hadn't done yet. So tonight as I'm knitting and happily watching House, I decide that I'll pop online for a demonstration of how to join two yarns together (how hard can it be?) knit one row further (so as not to complicate matters) then finish for the night, and head to bed.

The first thing I learned - even when it looks like there's only a very little bit of the skein left, that yarn can still go quite a long way when it's unwound and used. By the time I was actually on my last useable row of the first skein, it was an hour after House had finished. But no biggie - I'm off work at the moment, I can afford to sleep in. So, at 10:30 pm or so, I hop online to download and watch the video of joining two skeins of yarn. I'm right - the process is quite simple, and after a single viewing of the viedo, I'm fairly confident that I understand how to do it. My mistake then was getting distracted while connected to the internet - and as any internet-savvy person has likely experienced, I lost an hour to the web.

So at 11:45, I gather my knitting gear together and pack into the bedroom, where I figure I'll just join the two skeins, knit the following row, and it'll be lights out. A nice, relaxing way to unwind and prepare for a restful night's sleep.

On my way into the bedroom I spy the dirty countertop. So I drop my knitting off in the bedroom and come back to the kitchen - just to spruce things up before going to bed. It won't take long, after all, and means that there's a nice clean kitchen waiting for me in the morning. I pop the dishes from the counter and sink into the dishwasher, give the counter a quick wipe down, take out the couple cans for recycling and empty the trash.

So then, just after midnight, I settle down in bed. I manage to get another couple of rows out of my old skein before deciding that yes, I really do need to join the new one. I'd read somewhere that the best place to join the yarn is at the beginning of a row, so I finished off one row before attempting the join. The process I chose / learned really IS quite simple - basically, it's just knitting the two threads together as if they were one for a few stitches, then dropping the old thread out. Easy peasy.

And it is, really. Everything goes pretty much exactly to plan. It's not until I'm four stitches away from the end of that row that I realise I've been doing the wrong stitch ever since I dropped out the old yarn.

But no big deal, right? I realised before the end of the row, after all. I'll just reverse the process so to speak, unpick the stitches one by one, then do the row with the proper stitch.

Simple in theory, but apparently not in practice. The problem is now that it's 12:30 am, and I really should have packed it in about two hours ago. I'm not impatient - really, I'm keeping remarkably calm considering. But my higher brain function has apparently already signed off for the day, and I'm now working in territory I'm not overly familiar with. When I go to unpick the first stitch, I drop it. For experienced knitters, this is a minor inconvience. However, I've never dropped a stitch before and while I know that it's perfectly salvagable, I have no idea how. So I fire up the laptop and log into Knitting Help where, thankfully, there's a video showing exactly how to fix a dropped stitch. Mind you, it takes me about three tries - but that's not bad for a learning curve. It's only when I go to unpick the next stitch - and drop it - then fix it - then go to unpick the next stitch - and, yes, drop it and fix it - that I realise that something may be wrong here.

At the rate I'm going, I figure, I'm making no progress fast at all, and while I'm becoming quite practiced in fixing runs and picking up dropped stitches, I'm creating more problems than I started with by doing the wrong stitch. I'll do things the easy way, I think, and unravel the remainder of the row, right up until the join of the yarns.

Except I'm not very familiar with unravelling, either, and it's now just after 1 am. The row unravels fine, and I even manage to slide my needle back in... but then I stare at the yarn and have no idea how to recontinue. Simply put, I can't find my place. I'm in the middle of the row and the yarn's not where it's supposed to be but I can't work out how to get it where I need it.

Which is when I decide to unravel the next row, too, just to even things up a bit, start from the beginning of the row. I'll have to reattach the join of the two yarns, but I managed it the first time, didn't I?

Except that puts me on the 'wrong side' of the fabric which I'm not really familiar with. And it's a quarter past 1 am.

Which is when I decide to unravel the next row. Start off on the right foot.

The plan works, in theory. In practice, I'm apparently not very good at reinserting my needle, and I end up twisting approximately half the stitches upon re-insertion. It's not that big a deal, and really, I have to give myself credit for noticing the twist as apparently it's a novice error not to notice. But, notice I do, so with each twisted stitch, I have to manually pick it off the needle and re-insert it, the untwisted way. Simple, but alas, not the quickest of procedures.

Finally, though, at the end of that row, everything looks set to resume as per normal. I'm halfway through knitting the next row when I realise that the end of my yarn (of what is left of the first skein) is a big, tangled mess. I'm not sure how it got that way - I certainly haven't been working with anything that should have affected it, but I now I have stop, put down the knitting, and untangle the mess. Which I do - it's just that when I pick up the knitting again, I do so in such a way that I grasp the yarn and not both needles, and the right needle slides straight out of all it's stitches and drops onto the floor. I - very calmly, with only a few choice words - reinsert said needle, then find that I have to repeat the untwisting process handled above.

Yes, it gets done. The last row and a half of the old skein gets knitted. I join the new skein. It joins smoothly, and I drop the old thread out. I then - very carefully, knit the correct stitch pattern for the row with the new skein, and just for good measure, one more row on top of that, so as to allow myself to easily pick up where I left off when I next pick up the knitting.

I am, finally, done for the night. And somewhere in the back of my head, the advice my mother-in-law gave me when I first decided to start knitting is echoing around....

"Don't knit when you're tired, you'll make stupid mistakes."