The knitting

I’m very glad to have finally regained my knitting mojo after such a long hiatus. Once the days started lengthening and getting slightly warmer, my brain seems to have understood it was time for my hands to get busy making again.

However, my attention span might have been left behind somewhere, for I ended up making a few mistakes that I missed until much later! I’m glad I did catch them though.

I was knitting a Poet jumper and the pattern has sections with seed stitch. Seed stitch is created by overlapping a purl stitch over a knit stitch in alternating rows/rounds, so that you get a sort of dotted pattern resembling… seeds (the name says it all, really).
Without noticing at the time, I repeated two exact rows and ended up with something… wrong that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Once I spotted the issue however, there was no un-seeing it.

Can you spot the mistake? I can see it from a distance… It’s a little below the middle.

This put me in a conundrum: do I ignore the mistake and keep going, or do I frog the thing and correct it? I put it to social media, and the vast majority told me to leave it and continue. Naturally, this made me decide to frog it.

For the non-knitters: the term “frogging” is used because when you remove the needles from your work and pull the yarn back into the ball, you “rip it, rip it,” which sounds like “ribbit,” the sound frogs make.
(Don’t worry, I too was baffled when learning this.)

Completely removing the knitting needles from a project and effectively ridding the thing of its unravelling potential is daunting to me. When one does this, one also loses all useful markers set by the pattern creator, and I always fear I’ll forever miss my place and be unable to proceed… I took a deep breath, chose to trust myself and off the needles came. I stopped a couple of rounds before the offending mistake and opted to “tink” (that’s “knit” backwards – I know, I know…) until I’d corrected it. Phew.

Here’s the jumper, all finished, after I was set back two whole days of knitting.

You’d think my knitting snafus were over, but it seems I wasn’t done frogging… I started on my Ripple Halter and, a couple of inches before being finished, noticed I was one stitch off. Normally not a big problem, but this is a 2×2 ribbing which only remains correct if the right number of stitches are maintained, so I definitely had a problem.

I’d done it once, I’d do it again! Frog, frog.

This was also a scary one, because I had 8 markers I needed to put back in the correct place to be able to follow the pattern. I managed… somehow. Three more days of knitting, gone. It’s all part of the handmade process though, right?

The spinning

My spinning mojo has also returned. I wanted some textured art yarn and set about preparing the fibres to make it happen.

Once my Leicester Longwool locks were dry, it was time to spin.

Now I need to decide how to ply this. I think I might dye some wool top neon green, spin it  thin and use it to create a textured, thick and thin art yarn. What do you think? Also: am I mad for frogging days’ worth of knitting for what a lot of people deem “small mistakes”?

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Ever wondered what the difference is between wool top and wool roving? I wrote a blog post on it on my own website and would love it if you’d read it. Thanks so much!