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.