Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Sometimes you get the bear...

And this time, the bear definitely got me. The knitting bear, obviously.

As already mentioned, I signed up for a class to learn Fair Isle and Steeking. As a side bonus, we also learned how to knit continental. Ah, but when I knit my swatch, I didn't know we were going to knit continental, so I knit the swatch using the good ole throw method...

Turns out I knit much, much, much looser with continental than I do with throw. Don't believe me? Check it out:

Here's the sleeve


Here's the body
that's just the back...obviously...

Maybe not as easy to see in the picture as it is in real life, but suffice it to say, since Hagrid is only a fictional character, I don't know anyone I can give this to in its current state, so it's going to have to be frogged, after which I'll have to decide: Do I want to hang up this continental thing and knit throw from now on, or do I always just want to go down six or seven needle sizes and two-three garment sizes when knitting continental. I really don't like loose knitting, so I'm leaning toward the former, but maybe if I go down enough needle sizes it won't matter? I don't know. And since I don't want to make that decision right now, I've picked up my suede jacket to work on instead.
This is knit in Berrocco's Suede Tri-Color and here's the thing with that - if I had known it was going to knit up into such definitive stripes, I think I would have ignored the pattern and knit in the round, then steeked the front. As it is, I'm going to either have some seriously mismatched stripes when I sew it together, or I'll have to work really, really hard to make sure the stripes match up - and knitting isn't supposed to be about working really, really hard....so I guess I could frog this too - but probably not - I have a limit on how much frogging I can take in one week.
I guess that makes the score: Knitting bears - 2, Jo - 0.

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