purple peril...

I hope your knitting room looks like mine! The place is littered with waste yarn worms, issues of Knitwords all over, all the trims books open to certain pages, old swatches everywhere, partial and empty cones corralled! I’m in my glory, true production mode, like the good old days and I’m not cleaning up between! Nobody’s coming over to inspect or see! Why waste the time! No, I’m not showing you a photo!

I’ll admit, I felt a bit of defeat on that ‘sock-yarn-for-the-save’ top. After all, I had big plans to use the lace carriage and it’s been bugging me since then. I’m going to try it again, hoping I can pull it off. Fingers crossed.
I picked a ribber trim, #26 from the orange book, Ribbed Scallop and Eyelets. It starts out as 1X1 rib with the manual wrap cast-on, has a manual tuck stitch to make a little automatic scallop, yada, yada, yada. I just thought maybe I’d try some ribber – after all, other than that button band for Skinny, I haven’t used the ribber for anything since socks last Christmas – don’t want to get too rusty! Well, as usual I didn’t read the fine print. There are like 4 RTRs (Remove, Turn, Rehang using garter bar) in there so this really isn’t the quick and easy I envisioned. Perseverance gets me through and done. Oh, maybe I should tell you I am using a part cone of purple Panama, 284g, should be plenty. This top is a size smaller that the gold one and it weighed in at 216g finished. Now, concentrating on using the lace carriage, but only stockinette for now, I do the shortrows in the centre using the ravel cord method to reverse shortrow to round out the bottom hemline – here’s a refresher on that: https://knitwords.blogspot.com/2017/01/life-lessons.html
Get to the underarm. In my mind, I started the Back, but things are going fine, so who’s to know if I change this into the Front, get that lace motif going and then knit the Back plain? I had pulled out Knitwords No. 6 with Laced with Diamonds and figured seeing as how this was going to be for my Toronto sister-in-law – I don’t even know if she likes purple but what the hey? – I could do a portion of that just to satisfy myself that I could read instructions and get this done. I had the stitch pattern in my machine and all I’d need to do was turn it on! Started shortrowing the underarm shaping at the same time as the lace motif, got 24 rows done, cast off the shortrows and spotted a dropped stitch back on about row 10 of the motif. Fudge! Dropped it off, pulled out the 24 rows, rehung it, tried again. Ditto! Walked away, thinking it might be time for the hard stuff.
Next morning, shaped the underarms, cast them off and tried the motif again – who said it had to start at the bustline? Watched every row, got it done flawlessly! I felt I was on a roll, but the neckline was a little too high to be used for a Front! The second hem, we won’t talk about. Suffice it to say my third attempt worked (I did rewind each time, not taking the chance on wasting any!). Got up to the underarm and jumped right in, carefully shortrowing and lace carriage motif-ing! It worked perfectly but the remaining yarn has diminished to the point that I need plan A, B and maybe C!