Back in the saddle again

This weekend has been wicked hot here. It was 101 yesterday and was 84 today. ToolMan and I did our errand running very early on Saturday; so early that we'd eaten breakfast out, gone to the vet to buy Andy's insulin, done our grocery shopping, stopped by the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions, and were home befor 10:00 a.m. We had decided to lay low the rest of the weekend and just wait out the heat wave.

I hadn't touched my spinning since WWKIP, so an entire weekend at home was a good time to get back to my spinning. I finished up one bobbin and started a second of the Sheep to Shoe that I got at Blue Moon's Destash sale.



This was intended to be the "Rooster Rock" colorway but was one of the "oops" dye lots. I'm not sure what the "oops" part was, except there are areas that have very pale colors rather than the saturated ones shown on their website. I'm not spinning it in any particular manner, just letting the colors come as they may and I'll ply them the same way. Even though it's superwash merino, I doubt I'll do socks out of it. I'll probably 2-ply it for marled yarn and maybe do a small shawl out of it.

Remember last week, when I said I was going to make another tam to go with the cowl? Well, I casted on the second pattern from Three Tams, and went zipping right along, all confident in my stranded knitting skills and ability to read color charts while knitting on MAX to and from work every day.

Then Friday on they way to work, I got to the decreases and realized I had left my dpns at home. Oh, well, I can just do magic loop and finish it up on the way home, right? Except that on the way home, I realized first that I had lost the marker for the beginning of the rounds, and it was one of those pretty pearl ones Monica made. And, I had arsed up the pattern one one of the repeats at least 3 rows back. So I shoved it back in the bag and waited until I got home to repair the damage.

Once I got home, I thought I could use the same technique I use to correct cables to fix the spot I arsed up. Well, I thought wrong, because of course this isn't a single strand of yarn, but two. So while I could fix it, it left me with some stitches way to tight because I tried to squeeze and extra stitch out of one strand and other stitches way too loose because I didn't need as many on that strand. And it seriously screwed up the nice neat inside I worked so hard to maintain. So, I decided to frog it down to the mistakes.

Okay, so frogging off stranded knitting makes a seriously big mess. I was ripping it back with blue on my left side and white on my right so I could wind the yarn back onto the balls. So far, so good. Then I tried to pick up the stitches and realized that after ripping back and flipping the hat around a couple times in the process and because the beginning was hidden in a vertical stripe and because I had been so damned efficient at weaving in the ends as soon as I got past the corrugated ribbing, that I no longer had any idea where the beginning of the rounds was at.

So I just picked up all the stitches, figured out what row of the chart it was on, and started in again, figuring out that soon all would be clear. Except I somehow was now somewhere in the middle of a round and not at the beginning, and it appeared that I had either knitted one row twice, or left one row out completely. So the only thing that got clear was that now I had really screwed this puppy up. And now my second tam looks like this:



I admitted defeat and cast on a new project; the Lillehammer hat from Cider Moon. Yessirree bob, I got right back on the horse that threw me.



I am still obsessed with stranded knitting. This time I'm using all 8 stitch markers from Monica (Thankfully, the missing one turned up in the bottom of my knitting bag); one between each section so I can check the pattern as I go along this time. And I tied a piece of that green onto the marker at the beginning of the round. And I put the right dpns in the knitting bag already. Now, let's just see if I can read a chart.