One Crazy Fiber Lady

I trust that everyone has noticed that TypePad has been having some issues.  I found out the hard way when I hit the Post button.  It took forever and I never got the confirmation page, just an error page that a gateway blah blah blah.  For some odd reason I actually took the source HTML and copied it to Notepad.  That was something I did regularly back in the Blogger days but not since moving to TypePad.  Some little geeky voice in the back of my head told me to do it.  I was glad that I had after the error page popped up and backing up didn’t appear to be doing anything.  I tried posting it again.  After some delay, I refreshed my blog and voila there it was.  Then I got the comment email notification from Cate and was quite surprised that the post was up twice now.  Ugh.  I managed to delete one of those posts.  I also noticed the delays within the system when posting comments to other blogs.  Nancy fell to the effects of the "upgrade" at TypePad too.  I’ve got the thing configured so that comments are mailed to me.  They changed those darn things as well.  Instead of the Email of the commenter being used, it is now Typepad@typepad.com in the From field.  This is causing havoc in Gmail as it is an aggregator.  I loved gmail, until this morning when I read Katy’s, Nancy’s and Deb’s comments all aggregated into one thread.  Makes answering a tad difficult and just totally wrecks my filing system so you might notice in future replies that I’ve gone back to my old email addy.  Feh.  One thing I do like about their upgrade is that they doubled the drive space and bandwidth.  That’s nice.

Also in the nice category is that I arrived home to a package.  The crack yarn dealer that Denise mentioned in a comment last week sent the gorgeous Kid Seta yarn I ordered.  What a gorgeous yarn it is.  I quickly pulled out my Kidsilk Haze to compare the two, as I know some of you are waiting for me to do, and honestly, I can’t tell the differencd.  They are of similar fuzziness, sheen, grist, etc.  I compared the weight of the two of them are they are essentially identical.  As an aside, the pinkish/rose of Blushes and this green held together gave me preppy flashbacks of my early teen years.  I would go out on a limb and offer this up as a substitute for the Rowan Kidsilk Haze.   I’m feeling very weak in the knees… she’s got a sale on Cascade 220.  Ohm.  Ohm.

This is what Birch looked like when I started the "me" portion of last night.  You can see the difference between the stockinette based lace and the garter version. To my eyes, I’m much happier with the stockinette as it looks right.  The one thing I wasn’t happy about was knitting with my "wrong" hand (right).  While workable, it is frustratingly slow, though it does pick up as the project progresses, but not to the speed of the "right" hand (left).  Cate unwittingly struck on the answer for me in her comment yesterday.  She was substituting the ssk for the k2tog-tbl.  While I’ve substituted whole pattern pieces, I’ve never thought to replace stitches in lace.  Why?  No clue.  I’ve been reading the knittedlace list long enough to know that there are multiple ways of achieving the same desired effect but never really thought about messing with the pattern until Cate mentioned it.  So what to do about it?  My initial thought was to spend my commute home ripping out Birch.  Crazy?  I never claimed to be sane.  Discretion got the better of me for a change and before pulling the needles out again and losing what was an actual workable bit.  Not to mention that I was now doubly loathe to casting on 299 stitches.  Again.

I pulled out the Retro Red Kroy Sock yarn that has been living in my bag untouched since the last week when I ripped the sock, ready to be cast on again.  I grabbed the size 1 needles and cast on 29 stitches and began futzing around with different stitch combinations and my natural left handed eastern uncrossed knitting method trying to find the right look and feel that would match one row that I did as called for (started with two rows of garter stitch so the first pattern row had the stitches mounted in the traditional direction).  Would you believe that even with my backwards mounting of stitches, a K2tog-tbl looks identical to a K2tog-tbl when they are mounted correctly?  I was further dumbfounded to find that if I k2tog the way y’all would do it, but technically through the front loops, it looks the same as the traditional manner.  SWEET.  I was really and truly gobsmacked (to borrow a really cool phrase).  All that nonsense in moving stitches about, learning to knit with the other hand (while a good skill to know) were not really necessary! I could really follow the pattern as is.  My stitches slant in the correct direction (though backwards from a righty knitter).  K2tog goes to the left and a k2tog-tbl (or a ssk) goes to the right. After finding this, I pulled the sock needles out of the swatch, which didn’t last even long enough for a photo, and while on the train, shared Birch’s 7US with the sock yarn would produce.  This time I cast on another repeats worth of stitches and made it as far as you can see in the picture above.  Cool huh?  Was good enough for me.

Once again, Birch was reduced to an empty circular needle, a small ball of yarn and a completely unfroggable cast on edge.  I can live with it.  It still frogs very nicely for what Cate correctly calls a fancy-pants yarn.  Wish I had a nice fancy-pants needle to go with that fancy-pants instead of a Treasure Island purchased Clover bamboo.  Could be worse I guess.  I pulled out a gross load of jump rings and set about casting back on again.  I couldn’t find the bag with all those nice little o-rings I bought at the hardware store a week or two ago, but having played with beads recently I gave some jump rings a shot.  Works nice for initial rows and I have a boatload of them.  I placed a marker every 20 stitches of cast on, changing the type of jump ring every five rings, making counting far easier.  I knit 2 rows of garter and then started the first pattern row.  Having those nicely spaced rings worked perfectly as I had far less real estate to survey should I screw up a repeat somewhere.  By bedtime I had finished the first two rows.  This morning’s commute saw to more rows go down.  I removed the jump rings on the train this morning as they were starting to get tangled in the yarn and cause more trouble than they are worth.  Not to mention that by this time, I can more than read this pattern.  Thanks Cate!  Let’s just hope that the third time’s the charm cause I’d had for that fancy-pants yarn and fancy-pants pattern to be wasted, especially considering I already have the yarn for a second Birch.

Craft on!