These dramatic words were uttered quietly into Chris’s shoulder last night. Rewind two minutes and you’d find me whispering “No!”, followed by another “No!” worthy of Luke Skywalker after Darth Vader revealed his paternity. After what seems like a thousand mis-starts and hurdles on a simple center-out honeycomb baby blanket by Nikki Van De Car, I found that I’d thoughtlessly been starting and ending the rounds in the middle of a side of the square. My garter stitching was offset by a row in the middle. I’d promised myself this would be the last time I started this flippin’ blanket. This is getting ridiculous.
This is the first “fiber” piece I’ve ever tried. I’ve only knitted with acrylic before, so I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. The blanket pattern calls for KnitPicks alpaca silk DK weight yarn. It’s nice and squishy, fuzzy, and soft. Which I didn’t know to begin with. Instead, picked the cheaper KnitPicks shine sport in “butter”. It’s sleek, smooth, and kind of dense. Lovely, but definitely not squishy and fuzzy. So stretching the shine sport weight yarn to size 9 needles is like asking for spiders to come and live in your blanket. Seriously looked like a web. I tried going down a couple needle sizes, but size 7 needles still looked bad.
Ditch the yarn, I thought. I bought up skeins of different fiber content in the yellow color family, like the prospective mommy has asked for. I tried the alpaca silk in “oatmeal”, swish worsted in “sunshine”, shine worsted in “creme brulee”, double knitting my shine sport, and size 6 and 5 swatches for shine sport as well. The yellows and creams just didn’t live up to the beautiful, edible, banana yellow of shine sport’s “butter”. I couldn’t switch the yarns, I’d already fallen in love. So I settled on trying to adjust the pattern for my gauge on size 5 needles.
After all that hullabaloo, I’ve begun this blanket about five times, trying with all my might to get the double pointed needles to do my bidding. They don’t like me. I tug, I yank, I slip the yarn further down the tapered point of the needle to get a tighter stitch at the join, and it still looks like pieces of blanket held together by spider webs! This last start, which I promised myself would be the real “last time”, I manhandled the yarn into submission and got the joins looking decent enough. Until I knitted enough to realize my stupid round-starting mistake, with the off-set garter stitch. “Noooooooooooooooooooo!!!”
“I shall never knit again.”
“At least for tonight,” says Chris.
Of course, he’s right. It’s just bang my head against a wall, scream into the night, and smash some ugly kitsch in our house kind of frustrating. I’ll give myself a break of a day or two while I switch to my super easy ribbed scarf.
