The Perils of Knitting

As I walked up the stairs last night to go to bed, I noticed an irritated spot near the base of my right thumb. I thought it was odd, but didn’t think about it any longer than it took to vaguely register it was there. This morning as I was getting a couple of rows in on my Drachenfels, a sudden stab of pain told me what it was. You know my lovely new Addis? The sharp pointed, nickel coated, red cabled ones? Yeah, I was stabbing myself in the hand with them, just often enough to actually cut myself. Whoops…I will have to be a little more careful!

My wound is evidence that I’ve been getting a lot of time in on my project, though. I am tossing around a few other project ideas, but I want to see this one mostly through before I start something else. I’m up to just shy of 200 stitches so the rows are taking longer and longer. The pattern calls for increasing to 240 stitches but I plan on taking it far past that.

I incorporated the third color (dark grey) yesterday. This is how I decided to do it:

The plan is to do another few stripes then drop the charcoal and continue with just two colors. If I had it to do over, I might have chosen to do two stripes of the grey, then two of charcoal, etc. instead of one. I know I could pull it out and redo but…probably not happening this time. Now that I think about it, I could switch to that pattern now before phasing out the charcoal. So if the charcoal is A, the spruce is B and the dark grey is C (and they are), I could go from A B C B A B C B to A B A B C B C B a couple of times, then switch to C B C B. I think that might look pretty cool. Then, once the charcoal is out, I’ll eventually add D (light blue) and phase out B in the same way. By then I should have approximately half a million stitches so I will have achieved my goal of making it larger than called for!

This is the current state of things:

I’ve had a couple things I’ve had to remedy. I had to drop a stitch down 6 or 8 garter ridges to fix something weird that I did (never figured out exactly what it was) and knit it back up. Another time, I dropped a stitch but for the life of me couldn’t figure out how to fix it. So I tinked back over a row and a half to get a better look at it. I fiddled around with it for a while before determining that I had fixed it, probably right away, and all the ensuing fiddling had just served to distort and loosen up that whole area. A little judicious tugging later and it was back to normal, no dropped stitch in sight.

In terms of other upcoming projects, I’m thinking I might make a purple clapotis for the wifey’s mom. Is it just me, or does “purple clapotis” sound not quite right? In any case, I have over 900 yards of purple Plymouth Yarn DK Merino Superwash that I think would make a nice wrap. I’m still not exactly certain what she wants, but I figure I can always make her another one sometime so she has some variety. Other stuff is still on the back burner, so I won’t go into them yet. One thing I will mention is that I’m thinking of trying to do some autumn and winter/Christmas decorative stuff with some of my stash. Should be fun!