Who would have thought it? I have made actual progress. I have half a front and I am about to start those tricky double decreases for the raglan shaping.

I do have some concerns about gauge. I reknit the ribbing thinking those loose thoughts and it still seems rather small. However, I seem to have gauge on the lace pattern when stretched out just enough to actually show the stitches off properly. So for now I am knitting and praying.

Wendy is planning to knit herself Deli from Rowan Classic Cafe. I am smitten. I have had my eye out for something like this for a while now. If this IUI works and we don’t have to save all our pennies for the next treatment I see myself ordering some yarn from the UK one day very soon.

Yep, that is the remains of my first start on Carla sitting next to the remains of my swatch. And those twins are about to become triplets. I am on a roll.

It was quite fun knitting Carla in the round and I was a bit sad to give up on it, but there were a few problems. Firstly I found it really hard to make nice increases on this pattern stitch and even harder to back track and fix any mistakes. Perhaps a more experienced knitter could have worked this out, perhaps it was never going to work. At this point I just want to sit and knit until I have a sweater to wear. We have had great weather for Carla this week, it’s very motivating.

Back to the problems, the increases were “too hard”, I also had issues with sloppy stitches on one side of each sleeve (between the stockinette and the pattern stitch), this was mostly caused by the increases, so maybe it’s all part of the one issue. The killer issue was how to maintain the pattern stitch in the round. It was all fine until you had to go from an R2 repeat to an R1 repeat and suddenly you have a yarn back followed directly by a yarn forward and what does that make folks? A great big hole.

On the left we have one of the good joins between pattern stitch and stockinette, on the right is where it all went terribly wrong.

I have to say that despite all the effort I put into figuring out how to knit Carla in the round I was really in quite good spirits when I ripped my first attempt out and started again as per the original pattern. As I said earlier I just want to knit this thing, it’s fun and it’s so easy to knit I feel like the end is in sight already (now watch THAT come back and bite me). I cast on the front, knit the ribbing and a couple of the inches of the pattern and then I sat back to survey my work and it was SMALL. Let me say it again SMALL. As in, would fit a 12 yr old nicely, a SMALL 12 yr old. The pattern stitch might be fine but the rib is tiny. So as I said earlier, those twins, they are about to become triplets….

The question is, do I reknit on the same needles and just think loose thoughts, do I knit the rib on the same needle size as the pattern stitch (possibly also thinking loose thoughts) or do I knit the rib on the 13s and get some bigger needles for the pattern? Just how tight a knitter am I and what exactly has gone wrong here? I wish that patterns would give tension for the rib as well as the main stitch pattern.

Speaking of loose thoughts I am off to have an IUI this morning. Is it just me or is there something distinctly weird about trying to get pregnant with significantly more people than just you and your husband in the room? While I had always expected that explaining “how babies are made” to a toddler would be awkward, this was not the kind of awkward I had in mind.

Last night I came to a decision and in order to celebrate I ripped out my swatch. Quite likely this was a reckless thing to do, but then again, maybe not. I think I had learned all it had to show me.

Once that was done I cast on 58 stitches, joined them and got on with knitting Carla in the round. There is a photo, but it’s not very good, so you will have to wait until I have knit some more. Don’t hold your breath, as I feel the need to rip out a couple of rows, if not all of it, and redo the increases in some as yet to be determined but infinitely better manner. Particularly the first set of arm increases which look terrible. Carla’s stitch pattern does not make for easy double increases.

Adina sent me some questions:

1. Do you knit continental or English? Neither, I knit Combined. I learned continental style but my purl tension was way off and Alison kindly pointed me at Annie Modesitt

2. How long ago did you learn to knit? I learned to knit about a year ago in order to make Isabelle a woolen nappy cover when she started wetting through every other night time combination we had come up with (we even tried disposables which was less effective than cloth). I had a big break after that while moving states twice, and all that entailed. I started again in June or July 2004, which is when I learned about gauge, nice yarn, nice needles, etc, it is also when I changed to combined knitting.

3. First FO? A dolly blanket for Isabelle, which we gave to her with her first real doll at her weaning party in August.

4. Favorite yarn? I prefer natural fibers, actually I am yet to even try any synthetics (well All Seasons Cotton is a blend it’s true). My fiber snobbery started long before I learned to knit. In terms of knitting so far I prefer wool to cotton, which mostly seems to make my hands ache.

5. Favorite pattern? A favourite pattern suggests to me that I would knit it again and again, the more I knit the less likely that seems to be! I have made 2 Booga bags and three French Market bags but as wonderful as these patterns are I knit them twice (or thrice) because they made great gifts, not because I had an urgent need to re-experience the pattern. No favourite patterns yet.

6. Favorite pattern source? Hmmm, no front runner here either. Knitty, Stitch’n'Bitch, Debbie Bliss, Phildar, Rebecca, Rowan all feature fairly equally in what I have done or am thinking of doing.

7. Favorite needles? Addis, not fond of bamboo at all.

8. Nicest thing you’ve ever knit? the bags I made at christmas were very popular but I think my Big Bad Baby Blanket is closest to my heart at the moment.

9. Most hated project? The result was pretty but my hands ached for days after knitting this wash cloth for a friend.

10. Who are you going to pass this on to? umm, ahhh, I feel weird about passing on the memes so, no-one, sorry Adina!

It’s so long since I put my swatch down that I couldn’t remember which pattern row I was up to, or how to do the second row. Yay for blogging - having documentation rocks! Once I had that figured out I sat down with pen, paper and calculator and worked out the best way to redistribute the raglan increases. The increases are kind of erratically placed as written and it seems it would be better for them to be more even when knit all in one piece.

During the last few weeks of not knitting I have been thinking about Carla a lot and had recently come to the wonderful realisation that the dropped stitches on the sleeves actually need to be dropped from the wrist end when knit in reverse (duh!). So that is another of my outstanding problems solved. I think my pattern re-write is good to go.

This is all good right? Well it would be if I could figure out how to measure the gauge on such stretchy lacy fabric and I still need to finally decide whether to actually go with this approach or not. I have come to the conclusion that I can probably knit neat enough edge stitches to knit and seam Carla as Rowan intended, which would be so much simpler, at least in terms of being confident I would get the right look to the sweater. On the other hand I have done all this work to figure out a top down pattern and it would much more easily allow me to get the exact length I want on the arms and body.

I.just.don’t.know.what.to.do.

The quilt was a hit

So was the cake….

She was so tired today that not even an ice-pole was exciting enough to keep her awake come 5 pm.

And now, at last, I am going to knit. Let’s just hope that I can remember how.

And no-one else is dead either, well not in my family anyway. I think this might be a record gap between posts for me. I have no real excuse for not blogging, oh apart from this being a knitting blog and I just haven’t been knitting.

What I have done is finish Isabelle’s quilt, and a matching pillow slip too, but I won’t be taking any photos until I can actually get it out during daylight and get some good shots. I feel anxious about how to photograph something so large with no large or well lit place to display it. I have been working madly on Mem’s new website, and so has she, I am getting anxious about whether the end result will be good. I have been feeling anxious about Isabelle’s birthday party. I have been feeling anxious about changing fertility specialists and upping the interference with nature this month. I have been feeling too anxious about Carla to actually pick her up and start knitting. I just can’t decide whether to go with the original pattern or my own reverse engineered in-the-round version. I have been thinking about the TV meme daily, afterall it would give me something to say, but yep, you guessed it, that makes me anxious too. There is nothing on at the moment that I like enough to actually want to announce to the world that I watch, and yet the TV is on every night.

So um, I guess the title of this post should have been “I’m not dead but I am anxious”, though it has to be said that one thing I am not anxious about right now is dying, and that is something, right?

Back to the TV thing, I really have been thinking about this a lot. When Isabelle was 3 months old and I first caught her trying to figure out what that screen was on the other side of the room I was horrified and we immediately instigated a no TV while she is awake rule. Despite the fact that there were a number of shows I watched religiously back then I lobbied hard for getting rid of the thing. Jesse, who watched virtually no TV, refused. We kept it but we stuck to our “only while she sleeps” rule until we started moving around the country when Isabelle was 16 months old. Suddenly Play School became my best friend and now Isabelle watches more television than I am comfortable with but I just don’t know how else to get through the day… I on the other hand no longer have any shows I care that much for and these days I knit, so I don’t pay attention anyway. So what TV couldn’t I live with out?

Play School
Bear in the Big Blue House
The Fimbles
The Hoobs
Boobah
Pingu
Bob the Builder
Postman Pat

Not all in one day of course, but you get the picture. I still wish we could just get rid of the Television but now that it is her that is addicted it seems so much harder. Or maybe it is my dependance on her addiction that makes it harder. Whatever the case I don’t see us getting rid of it any time soon and meanwhile the most important thing on it is ABC Kids.

I really, truly, am going to start knitting again soon. Very soon, maybe even tonight.