It seems all my knitting is knit, rip, knit these past few weeks. I struggled so much with the increases on Antarctic Joy, I even wrote about it for little acorn creations this week: Learning from Mistakes (with a few extra stitches).
I’ve learned any project I take to shul knitting will need to be redone. I spend all my time helping others that I’ll set aside my work and then not pay attention when I pick it back up. I’ve started taking different small pieces to see if I can even work up a motif or a swatch, but last week’s motif ended up with increases shifted and it doesn’t look like a design feature. I need to rip that too, but I like the idea, so that is useful.
Speaking of starting over, yesterday I brought in part of a large donation of yarns and combined them with what we have stored from the sisterhood office. Among them was a large granny square someone had made and abandoned, a beautiful deep dark navy that would make a nice start to a project. I paired it with a Lion Brand Bonus Bundle Mandala cake that goes from muted dusty brick red to turquoise, yellow, tan, light purple, and back to pale dusty brick red. I loved the color combination and decided to work in garter stitch around the square.
But here’s where the problems started. The Mandala yarn is DK weight while the original granny square was worked in heavy worsted to aran weight. The gauge mismatch was obvious, so this morning over coffee I ripped my work and shifted tactics.
We have a large amount of DK-weight mystery white yarn in the donations, so I grabbed a larger needle and held that together with the Mandala, deciding to work in log cabin this time. The yarn weight was better, but the white created too much contrast – too stark against the navy, even when paired with the Mandala colors.
Back to the donation pile I went, digging until I found a skein of light cornflower blue. I think this will look much better with the dusty brick red and against the navy. Later stripes can switch to the white — I hope so, since I don’t have much of this blue.
So now it’s time to rip out what I knit at coffee this morning. Would a swatch have answered these questions? Maybe. So would better lighting while I was debating color. Sometimes, you just need to jump in and be prepared to rip out.
