Froggetaboutit (and happy birthday!)
Tuesday April 03rd 2007, 4:27 pm
Filed under: Knit


First of all: (trying to keep it quiet for her, sort of)–happy 21st, Michelle!

I love working with fingering-weight baby alpaca: it is soft, it is drapey, it is just wondrous to work with. You’d think laceweight baby alpaca would be the same, only even lovelier, if possible, as it makes even finer stitches. You’d be mostly right. But. The extra twist per inch in the laceweight of that long-fibered crimpless animal… The result is a livewire of a yarn. It does not hang docilely as you knit; it wants to jump off the needles and go play with its buddies, while you insist like a schoolteacher that the recess bell has not rung yet. Sorry. You just have to wait for the castoff before you can run off and play. Hold still!

Yeah, well. So I made a completely stupid mistake over at least 50 stitches, and didn’t notice it till quite a few rows later. Just a sideways shift and back–the kind that emphatically doesn’t pass the galloping horse test.

What I should have done then was to rinse the shawl, still on the needles, laid it out for the night, picked it up in the morning and THEN frogged it back and picked up the stitches again. What I did, of course, was to immediately put it down and go do that right now.

Had it been rinsed, it would have laid there as sweetly as a fingering weight. No stitches would have run, no yarnovers would have dropped. Since I didn’t, the bell had rung! Yay! Let’s go play! You and you, we’ll be teams, ready get set GO!, while I frantically tried to herd them back onto the needles.

Four hundred stitches per row (roughly), frog four, tink two. I did it. But it would have been a whole lot easier if I’d added a little water and patience to the process. I guess I was a bit tired of knitting this color and was trying a little too hard to get the silly shawl finished so I could work on that really cool green silk over there.

And then–annoyed at the whole thing–I picked it back up again to knit at least one row, to give myself a sense of triumph over the mess. And lo and behold. Everything was now perfectly in place. The baby alpaca felt gloriously lovely to work with as it ran through my hands. Ah, I remember now why I bought so much of this yarn in this beautiful color…


2 Comments so far
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Sounds like me wrestling my toddlers!

Comment by Michelle 04.06.07 @ 11:13 pm

Lol! Toddlers are cuter.

Comment by AlisonH 04.06.07 @ 11:47 pm



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