Ugh again

My unfortunate houseguest finally left, but not before a trip to Hong Kong and another night in the emergency room.  I'm just glad to finally have my home back.

Anyway, the Knitting Gods are not done messing with me yet, because the first thing I did when I had some time alone to relax was get back to the silk sweater I'm working on.  I got to the join for working in the round, when I reached a paragraph in the pattern that I couldn't quite figure out.  Like some others (as I saw later on ravelry) I didn't quite get the instructions for the neckline.  In hindsight I realize that the pattern is written correctly, it's completely my bad.  Anyway, I had to rip the 4 longest rows in the entire project.

Then came the bust shaping.  Actually I did most of the short rows on the train (I realized that knitting a sweater on a train near the equator isn't actually the weirdest thing I've done, and there's a deadline coming up so why not?), thus I know it took me a little over an hour. 

Everything was going great, until I had to knit the wraps.  Something inexplicable happened and I ended up with a single stitch dropped off the needles but a holy dumpload of yarn flying around.  And for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to get everything back in order - the yarn is dark, it was late at night, and there were wrapped stitched involved.  After about half an hour of fiddling and cussing this is the best I can do:

I really really don't want to rip and redo those short rows but that gaping hole looks terrible and I'll never wear a top with some weird WTF going on right on one of the boobs.  So, I've resigned myself to ripping out for a second time within like 2 inches of knitting.  On the bright side, I don't think the short rows are going to give enough space in the bust area, so I'm thinking to make some increases as well as doing the short rows.  Of course I need to do a little research first. What did knitters do before the existence of the online knitting community?

As a palette-cleanser, take a look at the yarn I picked up last month in Germany and forgot to blog about.  Nothing special but I am happy about the cotton sock yarn - I can make the bf a pair of socks he can actually wear.

Ugh

I have a friend in town and the whole thing turned into a disaster - he broke his leg on the first day of a trip that was longer than I would have liked anyway.  He isn't exactly a gracious or easy houseguest and with his injuries, he's taken over my room (ie my home) so life has been stressful to the extreme. Sounds like a perfect time for knitting, right? Except I haven't had a moment to myself, or even a quiet moment, since he got here ten days ago. Ugh.

Perhaps it seems rude to be talking negatively about an injured friend, but believe me if you knew him you would understand. I think most of us have a friend like that, somebody about whom others always tell us, I don't know how you can be friends with that person, he/she is so ______. But whether it's logical or not we stay close with them. And he is one of the few people I have knit for, which is saying something. It's just that he's best ingested in doses of not more than two hours and I've been in near-constant contact for ten days.

Anyway, the Colourmart contest projects are too big to take on the train now so I got back to work on some socks lying around.

Everything was going great until I noticed I was one purl stitch short, and found the problem when I looked on the inside of the sock. A dropped stitch!

 

Usually I wouldn't fuss about a dropped stitch, I do it all the time, catch the mistakes and fix them no problem. But I don't think it's possible to correct this one without ripping because I dropped it as I was doing a cable - there's no spare yarn in the next row and furthermore I think I've got all the twisted knit stitches in the wrong place now.

 

Anyway, (knock on wood) at least I had some time waiting at the doctor's office to get some inches in on the Palindrome Scarf without any mistakes.

 

I'm thinking about hiding in the library tomorrow for "research" and knitting a bit on my lunch because I need a serious injection of sanity so I don't abandon my friend at the airport.