As I was writing the
entry about my current sweater design effort, I surprised myself by
reaching the tentative conclusion that I should rip the whole thing
back (frog it) and do something more compelling with the lovely
yarn.   I really had not thought about that before sitting
down and writing out the text.  It was an interesting revelation
that had to be considered.

I reflected on it for a couple of days.  And, I reviewed my very
old blog entry (see here, and scroll down to “Knitting Broccoli”) about
a previous effort that I slogged through and eventually had to
frog.  I compared the projects.

In the end — I think I will not
frog the current design effort, at least not yet.  While I am not
wild about the colour combinations, I do feel I am still committed
enough to the project that I am checking important things like length
and other measurements.  I am not at all convinced that there is a different pattern of these
same colours that would really cause me to whip through a sweater
project at this time.    I’ve been travelling — travel
projects make better progress.  Quelle surprise.  I do still
believe I will be happy to wear the resulting sweater if I just finish
it, AND I believe that I am making progress (albeit slow) towards
completing it reasonably.  That’s a really long-winded way of
working my way to the point that I
think my biggest problem is that I am not spending much time on large
knitting projects at home, and ANYTHING is going to take a long time to
complete.

Somehow, that didn’t stop me from buying 6 skeins (a sweater’s worth)
of Araucania
Azapa (colourway Cornflower) today — I’m in meetings near Knit
Happens, and I Happened to wander in, let my hand touch a skein and
that was just that 🙂

It happens that there are 2 baby blanket projects I have done that have
each achieved a level of fame.  This was not an intended outcome
— it just seems to have… happened.   In both cases, the
receiving baby seems to have enjoyed the blanket, which is all that
matters.

The first blanket to achieve some level of fame (or notoriety) is the Dragon
Hide baby blanket (previously
blogged).  I’ve seen it appear on completely random other
pages, and if I look at the stats for my blog/web pages, I see that it
gets a fair bit of traffic — probably a hit every couple of days
(which counts as high traffic, for this blog 😉 ).

The second is the Tie-Dye
baby blanket, which I have not previously blogged about, but which
I did log in Ravelry, here. 
From Ravelry’s stats, I can see that it’s been viewed over a thousand
times (which is, approximately, a thousand times more than any of my
other projects 😉 ) and over 200 people have fav’ed it.

I have no idea whether how to compare those worlds — the un-Ravelry’ed
Dragon Hide or the un-blogged Tie-Dye baby blanket have each gone off
and struck peoples’ imagination in ways I could not anticipate,
measure, or reproduce.  I suppose, now that I have done a drive-by
blogging of the Tie-Dye
blanket, I should quickly post the Dragon Hide blanket to Ravelry, to
see if it captivates anyone there.

Or, not — see point above about what matters.   This is just
idle curiosity, and a matter of checking the heartbeat on the blog 😉

Good thing I’m not in the knitting/design business, I guess!

Here’s an old project, still underway:

That picture was taken over a year ago (September 2007).  There
has since been progress — but only a couple of inches or
so.   And this is the first piece of the sweater — there’s a
front and 2 sleeves to go after this piece is done.

It’s from my own design, and there are 2 reasons it’s particularly slow
going.

1. the patterning is inobvious — it’s painstaking to memorize a
   chunk of the pattern so that I can knit a row without having to look at
   the chart for every single stitch
2. there isn’t anything like enough contrast in value between the
   different yarns to give this the punch it should have

So, I’m picking at it from time to time, between projects, pressing on
to finish but not with enough energy to actually make significant
progress.

The first issue is a matter of lack of experience in pattern designing
— I have gained a new appreciation for the value of building
interesting things from simple building blocks (e.g., easily repeating
motifs that build up in clear progression from one row to the next).

The second could easily have been handled by, say, doing a SWATCH, with
the real yarn, instead of relying on the colours I had chosen to
represent the yarns in the knitting design software:

Sigh.  Lesson learned.

Here are a couple of closeups to admire the yarn, which is Green
Mountain Spinnery Mountain
Mohair.  I do think it is a wonderful yarn, and this is not
the first time I’ve used it.

Failed contrast	Glowing mohair

 
     

Of course, I could, and perhaps should, pull it all out and do
something more successful with the yarn.  I dunno.  The
overall project is over 2 years old.  Do I want to restart the
whole design process?  Or plug away until I have a finished object
to declare victory?  I guess I’m stubborn, and want to finish the
original design:  I think it will be perfectly wearable, just not
spectacular.  But at this rate, I could pull it out, redesign and
reknit it before I ever finish this original plan…

I feel I’m not making a lot of knitting progress this year.  
Maybe that’s really a “latter half of the year” problem.  Looking
at my completed
project gallery,  it’s not like it’s empty for 2008.

Sometimes, I guess you have to look back at a progression of things
(trees) to get the picture (forest).  I know I can look back on
certain years and see almost no knitting output — and further
reflection reveals that they were very busy and distracting years
(usually not in a good way).

What is notable about the gallery for this year is the prevalence of
small projects:  travel
projects.  That would be because of the wild travel schedule this
year.  This is borne out by the almost complete absence of
progress on knitting machine projects — you have to be on the same
continent as the machines in order to use them!

So — how do you look back and measure progress/distraction?

I believe I finally cracked the mystery of getting my Brother KH930 to
knit lace properly.  I’d struggled with this before, to no avail.

Brother knitting machines have a separate lace carriage that is used to
transfer stitches.  That is, you use the regular carriage to knit
some fabric, switch to the lace carriage to transfer stitches from one
needle to another.  This is what creates the equivalent of “knit
together” and (on the next knit row) yarn over.  It can take
several passes, depending on which way the stitches are meant to lean.
  The electronic program you’ve selected controls which stitches
get slipped where.   And, once they are all set up, you go back to
the regular carriage and knit a row, two or more.

Simple, yes?  And — fraught with peril.  Lifting stitches
off a needle is rarely a challenge for the lace carriage. 
Depositing them on the appropriate other needle is sometimes less
successful.  My experience was that I’d get along mostly okay and
then the machine would drop one stitch in 10.  Well, that’s A
LOT!    More than you can reasonably keep an eye on to
fix if you notice a stitch that looks like it’s about to take a suicide
dive on the next pass.  And it just made a nasty tangle instead of
lace.

I looked at any number of things — more weight on the bar pulling the
fabric; less tension; more tension; bent needles… no use.

The following swatch was worked bottom to top.  You can see things
started out poorly (though this is hardly the worst example).  And
then I Figured It Out, and things worked almost perfectly.

I suppose I should work a few more efforts before declaring absolute
victory, but here’s the key thing that seemed to make a (logical)
difference:  I ran the fabric being knit down over the ribber
needles (i.e., I covered the ribber needles with a piece of cardboard,
and kept the knitting in the front of the machine instead of having it
drop down between the ribber and the main bed.  Put another
way:  remove the angle of the backwards tilt of the main bed
introduced when you attached the ribber.

Or, perhaps most succinct:  use the ribber OR the lace carriage,
but never the 2 at the same time.