Culdesac Begins

This view out my window is why I love the midwest. Where else can you see yellow like that?* When I was in college, I lived in San Antonio (I went to Trinity University from 1987-1991). The trees kept their leaves. They did Christmas and strung tinsel and decorations around but it always looked to me like it was April where I came from and no one had remembered to take the decorations down. When I moved back to the home country for grad school I couldn't believe how much I missed the changing seasons. You'll never hear me complain too much about the weather. I love to measure the passing of time this way.

So what have I been doing the past couple of days while pondering the Holographic sweater? Take a look at this:

This is Culdesac from the Fall 2003 Knitters. It's an Elsabeth Lavold design. I'm knitting it up in Jaeger Matchmaker Merino, DK color 655. I'm about an inch and a half from the armhole shaping. Since I picked a dark yarn that doesn't photograph very well, my advance apologies. So far so good with this pattern. I'm cabling without a cable needle, which I like when the cables are narrow (i.e. about 4-6 stitches wide). About the only thing I can complain about is that the Matchmaker likes to split a lot, and this can sometimes be difficult when not doing cabling the old fashioned way. Otherwise is it very nice to knit with.

So far, I have only changed one thing about this pattern -- because life is just too short to mattress stitch reverse stockinette edges -- I decided to turn the edge stitches into a column of stockinette instead of reverse stockinette.

This is one of those things that I would never have thought about doing if I hadn't been reading Finishing Goddess Becky's stories of creating Smooch. The edge is curling now, but when I go to put it together, it will become beautiful and no one will know that I didn't fight that reverse stockinette seaming.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to this juncture without some issues to deal with. The central cable motif has some increasing and decreasing to help form those lovely loops. After I had completed the motif and decided to count the stitches, I realized one was missing on the left side.

I don't know how visible it is, but the top loop on the left side looked sort of misshapen, otherwise I probably would have just increased in a discrete area and gone on. For once in my knitting life, however, I listened to all that good advice out there and decided to fix the mistake before I went any further. Did I frog? Yes! Did I rip all the way back... well, no. I cheated. I only ripped back about 8 rows by 12 stitches.

As near as I can tell, repairing aran motifs is about the only useful purpose double pointed needles have (can you tell I abhor sock knitting on DPs?). Basically, you just disloge the group of stitches you want to do the repair within and then just rip out those. When you've ripped back far enough, you put the stitches you want to start with back on one of the DPs. I usually use two double pointed needles in a slightly smaller size than the main needles to do the repair work.

Here's the repaired motif. There's a little distortion around the left side of the top loop but that will work itself out when I block the piece. I am definitely enjoying this pattern. It has the right balance of speed knitting areas and areas that require my attention. I just don't have a long enough attention span or enough patience to work with really complicated Arans these days -- my languishing Malin is a testiment to that.

*As a biological aside... did you know that leaves don't really change color? A green leaf actually contains many pigments that are involved in helping the tree convert light into energy. The dominant pigment is chlorophyll, which is green. When the tree gets ready for winter, it pulls all that chlorophyll into the tree itself to use for energy later on and the other colored pigments remain. These colored pigments are called "xanthophylls" (xantho means "other"). You can check out this link for more info. And this link, too.