LoopyKnits

I am not feeling the stitchy goodness when I look at my craptacular afghan, a nondescript pinkish/wheat tone flecked with a rainbow of other colors. See, in a fit of knitting euphoria a year or so ago, I bought two gigantic spools of this cotton yarn on eBay. Only I didn’t know it was this super-thin cotton yarn that was more commonly used by machine knitters. (No one tells hand-knitting newbies these things.) Or that the “large spools” are, um, Paul Bunyan sized. Live and learn; I THOUGHT that shipping charge seemed unusually high.

 So I tried making a long casual sweater, knitting with two strands at once and communicating nearly daily with an incredibly patient pattern designer whose wisdom failed to overcome my knitting errors and mistaken assumptions. I was planning to make a really long duster-length sweater (no idea why, since I’m middle-aged premenopausal crazy and break into a sweat if I so much as wear long sleeves). I got pretty far along — from, oh, mid-calf length to about armpit length and I was getting increasingly alarmed at the error-riddled shapeless mass I was creating. I’d tried making a gauge swatch but apparently I knit a LOT tighter in swatches than I do when I really get to clacking the needles, so the stitches were all loosey-goosey. And not in a good way. And once again, my knitting fairy godmother failed to whisper in my ear that — cotton? — she is heavy. Like I need anything to tip the scales.

So I did what any sensible newbie would do … dumped the semi-knitted garment into my stash and moved on. And when I came across it again recently, I was intrigued. (How quickly I forget.) Took me nearly two full evenings to unravel it all, to the horror of my youngest daughter, who hated to see the stitches disappearing. The balled-up yarn filled up a queen-size blanket storage bag. I wondered what to do with it a while before inspiration struck.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? (No, not a dumpster run.) It was afghan time!

So I decided to try my hand at entrelac knitting, because I try to learn SOMETHING new with each project I take on. And once again, knitting has filled that essential spot in my life — bringing me humility. I keep slipping into automatic pilot and repeating the pattern in some funky freeform weird way that does not create a neat entrelac “woven” look. The stitches are more like, “Hello, I’m psychotic.” But I am stubbornly ripping out and re-doing. I am going to finish this darned thing so I can have more than just one finished project in 2007 (one sad little pair of socks), even if I have to foist it off on some unsuspecting person as a gift. I didn’t realize how many projects I’d tried and abandoned until I was updating this blog — yikes. So this one is a GO. You read it here first. I intend to get to another FO.

Here’s where I am so far, after 2-3 evenings of knitting. It really is going fast: 

And here’s the closeup:

Now I just have to name my project. If only I could figure out how to pronounce ‘entrelac.’ Is it ON-truh-lock, or ON-truh-lack? (I don’t think it’s on-TRELL-ick, is it?)

• Baby Got Entrelac
• Me No Like Entrelac (you must say it with a Southern accent)
• The ‘I Can’ Afghan
• The ‘Cotton to It’ Afghan
• The Pitiful Lapful
• The Sweaty Knitter’s Dropcloth
• Forgotten Cotton

Brain cells are working furiously on the soon-to-be-announced name.

Technorati Tags: cotton yarn, finished objects, newbie knitter, entrelac

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 7:07 pm and is filed under My Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.