Spring Break in Review, San Francisco 2009 edition

Yesterday, I got home from my week long break with Aidan in San Francisco, and as always, there was much yarn involved.

First, sorting, detangling and other manners of yarn-wrangling of Aidan's Stash. She has much, much cotton yarn.





Then, setting up the Yarn Altar. Yup, the Yarn Altar. This lovely cabinet has been commandeered to be a knitting shrine. The little sliding doors on the bottom hold all of Aidan's cotton yarns.




Also, we journeyed down to the Mission to eat at scrumptious Delfina's Pizza. At Imagiknits, Aidan found her long lost yarnbaby.


Aidan and I both worked on some of our WiPs. She was knitting a squishy-lovefest of a garter stitch baby blanket. I made some progress on my Hanami, but fell into some trouble on my plane ride back home.

Other exciting things happened, but were not "yarn related" and therefore are not chronicled here. (There was much visiting, and walking, and exploring, and eating. We did a lot of eating.)

What I'm Excited About

I made my way over to knitpicks.com last night and found out that they have started their own line of accessories. The knitpicks option needles are my favorite needles, and I love the prices. The new accessories are also very, very reasonable. These prices on ball winders, stitch markers, etc. are so much lower than what Clover goes for. And, AND, the blocking mats are $19.99 for a set of 9 interlocking squares. Also, the free shipping for orders over $50 is always nice.

It may be needless for me to say this, but I have a package on its way to me.

Knowing When to Throw in the Towel

This afternoon and evening after my adventure in the blizzard to go to court I sat at home and knitted. Nothing new there, really. I was enjoying myself, drinking some earl grey, eating some mac and cheese, and knitting away. (I was also watching Jekyll on netflix.com. It's a good one.) Anyway, I was thinking to myself: "I have three big projects that are coming to an end." Man, I was so very pleased with myself. I was contemplating blocking my newly finished projects: Lacy Chunky Throw, FLS, and Gma's Cowl. I was also thinking of what else I could cast on. My thoughts were a little premature. As I was seeing how big my Lacy Chunky Throw was, I found this:

Look about half way up. One ridge in from the garter stitch edge. Follow the columns of yarn overs. You should see a new ridge magically appear in the middle of a yarn over column. Yeah. Oops.

This is a close-up. Definitely. A. Mistake.

The problem: I think this mistake is big enough to rip out half my throw. It's not just a "oops, I knit a stitch instead of purling" mistake. This is "my throw is going to be a trapezoid instead of a rectangle" mistake.

In my disgust, I put the throw in time-out and decided to finish my Grandma's Christmas cowl (yes, Christmas was a long time ago, and yes, it's almost spring). All that remained to do was kitchener stitch the two halves together. I ate some dinner and got to it. About ten stitches in I notice the two patterns weren't meeting up exactly. I was frustrated and disappointed at the error but thought that it was a mistake I could live with. I stitched and grafted, grafted and stitched until I was almost to the end. That's when I had another, "Oh crap" moment.

See the blue needle with the green stitch marker? There are ten stitched to the right of the stitch marker and ten stitches to the left of the stitch marker. See the pink needle? It has ten stitches on it.

Yes, I knitted an extra lace repeat on one of the halves of the cowl. I guess I get to frog at least half of the cowl and reknit AND regraft.

I sat there staring at my pile of fails and contemplated fixing my FLS. FLS has been on hold while I've been recovering from ripping out a whole sleeve and reknitting it. It know needs the sleeve's cuff to be ripped out because I didn't release that there is a problem with knitting garter in the round: you get a funky seam kinda like the jog you get when knitting stripes in the round.

Here's a pic.

So after I pick myself up off the floor, I'll tackle the frogging and then the reknitting. I know that ripping it out as soon as you can and just pretending it didn't happen in the first place is the best thing to do, but it can be so hard to actually do it.