Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Revisiting the Tortoise and the Hare


Alouette09
Originally uploaded by runawaypenguin
It wasn't until I saw this picture sized down on Flickr that I realized I've been following the stripe pattern improperly. The second set of brown stripes is supposed to have a total of six oatmeal rows right below it, but right now there are only two. What a bummer. I don't really mind the ripping out, it's just that I now feel like I have thoroughly wasted all the time I spent knitting between taking the photo and actually looking at it.

I was just reveling in how much better I was doing this time around, too. If you ignore the frogging festivities about to take place, I've already caught up with where I was in the fall. The best part about this news is that I haven't been an obsessive maniac this time around. In the fall I was committed to cranking this out, and I spent such long stretches of time knitting that my hands started to hurt. Strangely enough, it wasn't actually the knitting motion that started giving me problems. I keep having to toss around the balls to let out some of the extra twist that gets introduced with every stitch, and all that flipping was making my wrists hurt. I don't know if this overtwisting is a common problem or particular to certain types of yarn, but I can't remember hearing anything about it before. Fortunately there have been no wrist problems so far.

2 comments:

Lydia Agnew Speller said...

But it looks lovely, who will know what the pattern SHOULD have been?

Rachel said...

It probably would have worked out if I kept doing the same pattern of stripes the whole rest of the way. It's alright though, I've got plenty of time...we're clearly through with sweater weather for the next four months.