More Bad Knitting

It was even worse than I thought it was.  And I thought it was really bad.

For those of you who are joining our saga in progress, I picked up the Rowan Anise sweater, which I had cast aside a couple of months earlier in favor of finishing holiday knitting, while in the grips of a really bad case of the flu.  I was bored.  My temperature was well over 100` and I was taking an interesting cocktail of decongestants and asthma medicine.

Who was I fooling?  Disaster was pretty much a given here, right?

But it was worse than I thought as I struggled out to my local yarn shop with the disaster that was Anise in hand.  I was about one day shy of being better — you know, that feeling when you know that by the next day you’ll be feeling good again?

Let’s review the bad knitting photo.

Mistake one involved length while mistake two involved patterning.  But the blatantly obvious, so stupid that a novice knitter would see it immediately mistake, the mistake the all of y’all were too kind to comment on and that Jamie, the incredibly wonderful woman at my LYS, who patiently helped me reboot the sad mistakes in this sweater, gently pointed out, without even a hint of snarky laughter?  Mistake number three, the major, no hope of ignoring it mistake, was the fact that I, ahem, did the neck shaping on the wrong sides.  Look closely at the picture.  She the four stitch moss stitch border that should be on the meeting inside edges on the front, but is instead out on the side seams?  Enough said?  Jamie was very kind.  She even helped me realize where in the pattern I went wrong (I won’t bore you with the details, let’s just say that knitting both fronts at once, putting them down mid-knit, and knitting sick created the perfect storm).

After an entire day and very late night of re-knitting, Anise was ready to be blocked today.  It still has some problems and I am afraid, as I have been all along, that it is too small despite the fact that my gauge is spot-on.  But it’s pretty.  Those moss stitch panels are a thing of wonder and beauty and blocking really brings this one out.

Sleeves are in progress — two at the same time, since the flu is gone.

And a final note of thanks to Squirt, the cat, who remained happily napping on Ellie’s bed instead of making a beeline for knit items being blocked, which he usually loves to nap on.  I need to make Squirt a bed of Alpaca, his favorite fiber, out of gratitude.