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.

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.

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.

I think I mentioned when I started this blog that I tend to be a one big problem at a time kind of person. Well I my blog is suffering from my one-thing-at-a-time-itis. Carla is still there at the top of my knitting pile, I even pulled her out and knit 2 rows on the weekend. Yes, two rows. Of my swatch. Yep, that’s 40 stitches. It’s sad, I know.

On the other hand I have reconciled about 10 bank statements paid a bunch of bills and generated a whole bunch of invoices. The things is I have about 10 more invoices to go, then I have to send them. Then I have to generate and send statements. Blah, blah blah. Book keeping sucks.

I have a website to rebuild, which all of a sudden is needed next week and I have less than 2 weeks to complete Isabelle’s quilt. And I feel compelled to do these things one at a time. It feels like I may never knit again. BUT! I promise that I will knit again, no more than 2 weeks from now, and that when I do I will be knitting a like a woman possessed… at least I hope so, autumn is looming and I want to actually wear some of those things in the queue!

So I am very sorry if I seem somewhat boring in the meantime, if it is any consolation I am bored too. Rock Chick has sent me a meme. I fear that I am going to find the answers embarrassing to admit, but given the lack of knitting content I am probably going to fill it out anyway - at least there will be something to read.

You may recall that the pattern stitch for Carla is :

R1: k1, *yfwd, sl 1, k 1, psso* to last, k1
R2: p1, *yfwd, sl 1, k1, psso* to last, p1

And that I thought R2 in the round might look something like this: *yfwd, sl 1, p1, psso*, or perhaps this: *yfwd, sl 1, p1, psso*. Wrong. Wrong. And the two or three other methods I tried - also wrong. Time to break out the books.

You know I enjoyed sitting down and reading Maggie Righetti’s “Knitting in Plain English” cover to cover, I learned a lot and she made me laugh. But more and more I am coming to realise that Montse Stanley always seems to have the answer. To knit Carla in the round you need to do this:

R1: *yfwd, sl 1, k 1, psso*
R2: *p1, sl 1, return slipped stich to left needle twisted, return purled stitch to left needle, psso, slip purled stitch purlwise, yb*

Sounds complicated but really it’s not, though it’s not quite as easy as the first row. And as you can see it works! The top 2 inches or so of my swatch were done “in the round” and despite the poor lighting and shadows in all the wrong places you can sort of see that it is indeed working.

I have some quilting to do tonight and then I will start playing around with doing the double increases and if that works I need to figure out how to handle the stitches at the top of the sleeve which need to be dropped and then (assuming it all works, which is no doubt assuming a lot) I am going to knit this thing!

I wrote this post last night in Adelaide and was pretty much done when Mum’s dog tore past the table, got tangled in the phone cable and pulled my laptop off the table, sending it flying across the room, thus ripping the screen from the case and rendering it utterly useless. I am currently computerless while Jesse transfers my harddrive back to my old (OLD) machine and prays to the insurance gods for a replacement laptop.

Thanks to everyone who offered advice on the pattern for Carla, with your help (particularly all the email support from Nancy) I managed to finish writing out the tricky part of the top down version of the patter. So today I swatched. I have to say I am a little confused, Nancy felt that a yarn forward was not the same thing as a yarn over, and Montse Stanley agrees. But clearly if I knit the pattern with a yarn forward (which does not create a stitch) there would very shortly be no stitches left at all. I don’t know if the call for a yarn forward is a mistake or if, despite studying the text and photos of my Knitter’s Handbook I don’t quite get it. I went ahead and knit the swatch using what I think is a yarn over and the pattern looks correct to me. If anyone who has made Carla can confirm that my swatch looks right I would be deeply grateful.

Of course this swatch was knitted flat. And, funnily enough my edge stitches are unusually neat and the pattern is very simple knit flat. So do I try to figure out how to reverse the pattern and continue on with the top down idea or do I just follow the pattern as written? Oh, and how much do you stretch out such a lacey pattern stitch to check your gauge? All these questions and more must be answered before I can continue…

In other news I went shopping. The other day while buying the rest of the fabric for Isabelle’s quilt I picked up a couple of skeins of Katia Nordic to make a Buttonhole bag for a friend. I got it home and realised I would need two or three times as much yarn as I had, which would be two or three times my budget for the project. Today I took it back and exchanged it for this instead:

It’s going to be a Market Squares Bag and I got so excited I bought this too:

You guessed it - a second Market Squares Bag. I am really looking froward to doing these but they will have to wait until after Carla, Peach Jacket, Isabelle’s Debbie Bliss Cardi, Isabelle’s Poncho, my Jo Sharp vest, you get the picture…

I think I am going to bite the bullet and try converting the pattern for Carla. I have in fact started already. Can somebody (anybody) PLEASE explain to me what “dec 2 sts at each end of 5th and every following 8th row to 11 sts” means. Is that on the fifth row and then always the 8th row from then on, or is it 5th then 8th then 5th then 8th? I have a lot to learn about pattern reading. Given my difficulty in reading the original pattern, the fact that I am trying to convert it probably points to some kind of mental problem on my part.

Oh, and problem number two… The pattern stitch is :
R1: k1, *yfwd, sl 1, k 1, psso* to last, k1
R2: p1, *yfwd, sl 1, k1, psso* to last, p1

If I am knitting it in the round does that make the repeat for R2 *yfwd, sl 1, p1, psso* (assuming that a yfwd is a yarn over and that on the purl row you would be doing the purl version of a yarn over). Or is it more complicated than that? Perhaps R2 actually needs a right leaning decrease if knit in the round? Would that be ktog or something similar? Clearly I have some swatching to do. Some serious swatching.

But now for a little light relief:

These are the knitted toys I bought Isabelle and my grandma’s spinner’s and weaver’s guild (or sinner’s and griever’s as my mother and her siblings are inclined to call it). Aren’t they cute? She has been toting them everywhere we go for three days now, which is a long time for any toy to stay popular in this household.

I assembled Isabelle’s quilt top last night. Now I have to buy batting, backing and the fabric to add a border like this. I am thinking a thin strip of green, a wide strip of pink and then green or purple binding.

I am unexpectedly getting on a plane home in less than 2 hours as my Nana has had a heart attack. She is as ok as she can be, but it was severe and they are running out of options to help her so Isabelle and I are off to see her while we can. I am taking the makings of Carla with me, but don’t be surprised if I come home with a Sophie instead (not made from Cotton Tape of course). I grabbed some Cascade 220 from the stash just in case Carla is too much to get my head around while away.

I may or may not be able to post while I am gone. And now I am off to deal with the fact that I had a HCG trigger shot this morning to make me ovulate, right before I got the news that I won’t be here to make use of it.

What’s this? It’s the end of my secret project. No, I am not going to tell you what it is, but it does mean I can start work on something less secretive… I still have more than usual going on parallel to the knitting, so progress may be slower than normal. It may be slow, but I am making headway on all my projects in a rotating system at the moment. I am concentrating on one project per day and sometimes squeeze in some time on one of the others. It goes like this: book keeping, quilt, website redesign (not this site), knitting, start the loop again. None of it is moving as fast as I would like but everything IS moving and that will have to do.

Sometime in the next two days I have to figure out whether to fix my BBBB first or start Carla. I am a bit anxious about starting Carla with so much else on my mind. I fear I am going to need to be really concentrating on what I am doing, especially at the start. I have issues with edge stitches at the best of times and from everything I have read about this sweater it is really hard to seam nicely and I know that I just won’t wear it if I get it wrong. I am thinking pretty seriously about re-writing the pattern top down all in one piece. The fact that this is my first sweater with sleeves makes me feel somewhat anxious about modifying the pattern (at all, let alone so radically). I have never made a full sweater, therefore I have never knitted top down all in one piece before either. I don’t know why exactly this method appeals to me but it does, it just seems really sensible. As well as my concerns about the seams knitting top down would also allow me to get the waist and arm lengths just right. I suspect I may want the waist somewhat longer and the arms somewhat shorter than the pattern but I am not sure… On the other hand it could just be an all out disaster…