I tried it on.
It’s too big.
But not “OH SHIT TOO BIG!” like it was before, more like “this could maybe use a bit more negative ease, hmm”. And it’s just the right size for the boobies. I’m about a 35″ bust and it measures about 32.5″ around, and my evil torture bra will probably smoosh down the boobs a little, so, nice and snug and not too stretchy. But it’s bunching up weird elsewhere, there’s this strange wrinkle in the back that is making me wonder whether I have a grossly misshapen body, because – it’s a tube! A stretchy tube! How the hell does it find somewhere to wrinkle strangely?
And then I thought, maybe when it’s actually finished, the elastic at the top will pull it in nicely, and the ribbon around the middle will pull it in nicely, and all will be well.
And then I thought…
… I didn’t wash my swatch.
Of course I didn’t. Of course I was too lazy to wash it, and then unraveled it to reclaim the yarn, and now it’s going to bite me in the ass. How does Rowan Calmer behave after washing? I turned to the internets, which told me that its gauge changes after washing. But not in what direction. Oh, internets.
It changes. Does it shrink? Does it grow? I don’t know. Do I have extra yarn to make another swatch and wash it? Of course I don’t. If it does shrink, will the bottom part be too small for my giant hips? Yes, probably. (And hey, whoever found my blog by googling “giant hips”? Stop that. Stop that right now.)
Am I going to stab myself in the eye with my knitting needles? Yes, yes I am.
I caaaaan’t rip it back again. I just can’t. I want this top to be finished and I want my soul back. I’m tempted to finish it, chuck it in warm water for slight shrinkage, block the snot out of the lace so it’ll be large enough, and call it a day. Surely nothing can go wrong with this well-thought-out plan…
I have Ravelry envy.
I put myself on the invite list quite a while ago – I want to say two weeks or so – and I think it was right around the time a million other people did too, so of course I haven’t gotten an invite yet. And everyone keeps talking about how great it is and I WANT TO PLAY! *stamps foot*
And now I’m paranoid that I screwed up somehow and didn’t put myself on the list after all, which means that I will never ever get in. (How do you screw up putting your email into a form and clicking a button? I don’t know, but I bet I could do it.)
Maybe my petulant whining will convince the Ravelry Invite Gods to somehow let me in, if only to make me shut the hell up. What? It could happen…
It looks so cute and innocent, doesn’t it? You would never guess that it EATS SOULS.
I don’t get it. It’s a lovely pattern, and it’s an easy pattern, just some simple lace and then some simple eyelets and then some simple stockinette. Only I could find a way to fuck it up.
Here’s what I did – I picked a different yarn. With a different gauge. And then did the math to figure out how to alter the pattern. And I did the math correctly, even. (Yeah, I know you were thinking it.) It seems that doing all that is the equivalent of putting my soul on a nice serving platter with a selection of condiments.
I started knitting. It was too big. I mean TOO BIG. I wish I had taken a picture. If I stretched it out a little it looked like I had a hula hoop around my waist. So I frogged, and took out a whoooole lot of stitches, pattern and gauge be damned, and started over, and created a tiny thing that looked like it would fit an eight-year-old, and then tried it on, and IT FIT.
I am not the size of an eight-year-old, so I can only assume that this Lelah does not obey the laws of nature. Given the gauge debacle, it definitely doesn’t obey the laws of mathematics.
Anyway, I happily knitted on, and got to the stockinette part, and thought, nuh-uh, no way is this fitting over my boobs without stretching and going see-through. We don’t want any wardrobe malfunctions, so I increased some stitches. Knit knit knit, and tried it on, and it was (say it with me now)…
TOO BIG. Again.
Of course I didn’t have a lifeline, so I had to do the thing where you try to put the stitches on your needle before ripping, and I messed it all up, and picked up some stitches from the wrong row, and then had to fix that big mess, and I will not elaborate further because I’ve already said fuck once in this post and I don’t need to say it twenty-seven more times.
Re-knit without the increases, and it is just about time to try it on again but I’m kind of afraid to. WHAT NOW? HUH? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO TO ME NOW, YOU ACCURSED TUBE TOP OF SATAN?
I still think the pattern is just darling. And the finished object probably will be too, if it ever actually gets finished.
I has a swatch (but not a bucket)
What’s this?
Well, it’s a teeny little swatch, that’s what. But what’s so special about it?
Is it the yarn?
No, that’s just some leftover cheapass cotton/nylon from the creepy headwrap with eyes. I picked it because I wanted something DK weight without much elasticity.
Is it the pattern?
No, it’s not from any pattern that I’ve ever heard of. It’s just a little ribbing, and a little lace, and a strange-but-on-purpose ridge, and some stockinette. Kinda pretty, but nothing that interesting, right?
Is it the amazing mad knitting skillz?
HAHAHAHAHA. Um, no.
So, what’s so special about it?
Well, there’s absolutely nothing special about it as far as anyone can tell. Nothing special at all. Right…?
(Dun dun DUN.)
Gratuitous yarn porn post!
4 skeins of Malabrigo merino worsted in Cinnabar from the Chez Casuelle sale. It will eventually become a cardigan. Until then I’ll just pet it periodically and roll around in it naked gaze upon its beauty.
Oh yeah, and I changed the colour scheme for the blog (not like anyone saw the old one). I was going for “charmingly hideous”, and may have instead landed on “hideously hideous”, but oh well. I’m sure I’ll get bored and change it again anyway.
And I added a syndication feed whatever thingy. At least I think I did.
I still hate Blogger.
It’s done! And it’s a bit too big. But not big enough to redo it. And hopefully not big enough to look frumpy.
Pattern: Rusted Root
Size: SmallMedium (yeah, read on…)
Yarn: Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece in Terracotta Canyon, 3 skeins (with a fair bit of the third skein left over)
Needles: size 6
I have a disease. Why don’t we call it screw-with-the-pattern-itis. I can’t not modify a pattern. I tried to be good with this one. I said, I’m changing the lace to a cable and that’s IT, I obey the pattern after that. Obviously that was an exercise in futility.
First, the cable.
I didn’t want to have to wear a shirt underneath it, so the lace had to go. I used a banana tree cable pattern and I found it here. Of course, in that pattern it’s worked bottom-up and flat, and Rusted Root is worked top-down and in the round. Ohnoes!
Apparently other people want to try the banana tree cable mod, because eleventy million people PM’d me on Craftster to ask how to deal with that issue (okay, three people), and here’s how:
1. Ignore the written directions and print out the cable chart.
2. Turn the chart upside down.
(3. Profit!)
That’s it. And if you don’t know how to read a cable chart – neither do I! Turns out they’re very intuitive. Who knew?
Second, the amazing disappearing poofy sleeves (and how to coax them back into existence).
Everyone on Craftster was losing the poofy sleeves, and the poofy sleeves were my favourite thing about this pattern, so hell if I was letting them disappear.
What I did was cast on for the medium, and kept following the medium instructions until row 36, then switched to the small instructions. This meant I ended up with a wider neckline and more sleeve increases than the small. I had to do a little bit of number-crunching when I got to the sleeve decreases, since all the stitch counts were slightly off. This also made the body 4 stitches larger than the small.
I have a theory about why the poof goes away – there are two “tiers” of sleeve increase amounts (on row 8) between six sizes. (XS and S get 5 sets of increases, M, L, XL, XXL get 6 sets.) I think only the smallest size of each tier gets the right increases-to-total-size ratio… I mean, if you’re adding the same amount of stitches to a little sleeve and a big sleeve, it’s going to be more noticeable on the little sleeve, right? So if you’re knitting a size other than the extra small or the medium, you’re probably going to lose some poof and might want to mess with the increases.
Other mods:
– I added hip increases. Because I have giant hips. After the waist decreases, I worked even for a couple of inches and then mirrored the decreases.
– I did a crazy weird bindoff on the neckline… knit the two knits together and purled the purls. Because the neckline was curling. Like crazy. Like, no amount of blocking will fix this kind of crazy. If you try this, be careful – it makes the neckline very tight, so make sure you can get it over your head. It fixed the curling, though!
– I purled all the other bindoffs instead of binding off in the rib pattern.
– I added a couple rows of ribbing to the sleeves. If I remembered why, I’d tell you, but I don’t.
– I snuck in some decreases on the sleeves right before the ribbing, because they were a bit too big (side effect of my size-fuckery, I think).
I… think that’s all of them. I am proud of subduing my inner control-freak who wanted to change half the k2togs to SSKs so they’d be mirrored (and seriously, nobody would have ever noticed the difference, so shut up, inner control-freak).
A note on Cotton Fleece… I mostly liked it. It has a nice sheen and it’s pleasant to knit up; the wool content probably helps. It’s a bit splitty, but not horribly so, and there were no knots in any of the skeins (a few pulled-out threads, though). And it’s pretty soft.
The only thing is… IT DOES NOT DRY. EVER.
I laid the damn top out on towels to dry for TWO THREE DAYS, and it was still damp. Then I got sick of waiting and chucked it in the dryer, on low, for about 25 minutes. (I did check the interwebs first to reassure myself that the dryer wouldn’t do anything bad to the yarn, and it didn’t.) Still slightly damp. Are you kidding me, yarn?
But I’d use it again. And I’d knit Rusted Root again… half a size smaller… and with even more mods! Muhahahahaha! I will never be cured!
