My Fandom Knitting (not what you think)

2014-04-02T18:05:40Z

Posted by: untonuggan

I am currently knitting SweaterBabe's Covetable Cape.It is a lovely pattern, and I cast on with some trepidation as I was watching Downton Abbey Season 4 Christmas Special while knitting a new pattern (i.e. counting, adding stitch markers, etc.) that also included a large cable pattern and two lace sections. It went swimmingly. I even watched about half of X2 and got about 15 rows into the top-down pattern without any major errors. (OK, so perhaps I missed the first row of the button band -- no one will know that kind of thing.)

Then I went to Knit Night -- the place where I tend to get tons of knitting done -- and things went downhill quickly. I purled where I should have knit on the cables; I lost track of where I was on the lace and cable charts even though I was marking it down on the pattern (somehow that didn't match up to my actual knitting); I dropped stitches; in attempting to fix things everything got worse. My attempts to insert a lifeline were very frustrating.

Yesterday I finally yanked out the needle and re-cast on. I decided to try watching Tin Man, a fantasy miniseries about Oz. Again, things went swimmingly (except somehow the cable is now on a garter stitch background instead of reverse stockinette, but that's less annoying to knit, so I'm good with that as it still looks great.)

Today I sat down with the Madonna Pandora station on, and I tried knitting the next row. Just the next row. It took about 20 minutes to get through the first lace section (somehow I had one too many stitches, I could not figure out why, eventually I fixed it with the time honored tradition of knitting two together ;) ). Then I got to the cable section, and OMFG. I dropped a stitch, found it, tinked agonizingly back (tinking is not kind in cables), knit again...and there was another dropped stitch. Found it, tinked back again, the same thing happend.

At this point I yelled (literally) at my knitting that if it didn't behave it was going in the closet for a week while I knit hats. From handspun. So there.

I fixed the dropped stitch (which took time, it was cantankerous), and finished the row with no further problems.

This seems very odd to me, because it's completely opposite of my usual knitting experience. TV = mistakes ; knitting people = progress; late nights = waking up in the morning to regret and bizarre knitting errors and wondering what the heck I did the night before.

I can only draw one conclusion from this turn of events:

My knitting has gained sentience, and it (she?) enjoys late nights and watching geeky TV. To optimize the knitting of this project, I should take her to the new Captain America movie and leave an assortment of comic books in my knitting bag for when I'm not able to knit.

That way, we'll both be happy. And there'll be no need for closet exile.

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