the zen...

of intarsia knitting quickly disappears when you spot dropped stitches. Add Wool Crepe Deluxe, tiny little stitches in salt and pepper tweed, almost invisible against the steel tones of the needles and sinker posts. And a dropped stitch? When you notice it? It’s like a silver bullet, dropping like a stone! And there’s usually two or three, grouped! Aaaarr-g-g-g-h-hh! What was I thinking? 

You know, funny thing, I keep remembering a conversation, years ago, with a machine knitter who was telling me about her many machines, twelve or more in total. She began itemizing them, had two silver reed standard gauge machines, I asked her why and she blithely said oh well, you know for those times when you have an intarsia project homesteading on one, you can still do a lace carriage project on the other… I’m pretty sure I just walked away, shaking my head. Am I wishing for another machine? No, not really because I’ve never let myself get bogged down with a project, forcing myself to finish one before starting another.

Yeah, so, I made a sleeve (centre, bottom). Relearned intarsia, relearned increases. Because the needles are out in C position, latches open, ready for the laying of the various colours, to increase full-fashioned, with the 3prong tool, move the outside edge stitches back to B, lift them off, bring a new needle to work and move those 3 out the one space. With the single end, pick up the heel stitch of the third stitch, fill in the empty needle and return all 4 needles back to C, making sure you didn’t disturb any of the other latches… that’s the biggest issue! And, should the work be out front? In front of the ribber, which is my standard – I always think you can see the work better and increasing/decreasing is easier…but, I learned (or should I say re-learned) that because the work is behind the latches, having the work out over the ribber creates more issues with the latches closing before you want them! OMG! I obviously wasn’t thinking!

Looking at the finished sleeve, from the right side, thought I’d like the stripes to be more straight-lined, not so random looking but it wouldn’t matter to me that sleeves would be different. Started the second sleeve (left), fully intending to reverse the diagonal of the stripes, got carried away and forgot that until about 40 rows into the patterning. Oh well, finished that one and made a third! No biggie, it’s not like there’s a deadline or anything!