Oops...

I got mad at my FLS for a while. I attempted the first sleeve about 6 times and now matter what I did, I could NOT get the lace to even closely resemble the lace on the body. I blame this on a major change in tension in switching from flat to in-the-round, something I was not aware of until I tried this. Ugh.

I tried getting some photos to demonstrate the sheer ugliness that was the sleeves, but dark yarn and my increasingly evil camera could not agree and make a photo for me.

My YOs on the entire body of sweater had been freakishly tiny. Still confused about that one, but since it was done and I'm not doing it again, screw it. I think I purled them through the wrong side. That's my guess.

So I tried and tried and tried to get the sleeves to match and there was no success. I went down a needle size (in-the-round), switched to flat knitting, changed needle sizes a few times too, and nothing worked. In a fit of rage, I threw the sweater and it's mess of a ball of yarn across the room and yelled something vaguely like words.

Finally, at knitting this past Tuesday, I said screw it and decided I was going to have garter stitch sleeves. Which would have been WAY easier had the stupid pattern not called for 4 random rows of lace before splitting for the sleeves. I had issues with this random lace repeat as I was doing it. It just seemed... wrong somehow. Maybe I was having a psychic moment.

After a lot of hassle and picking up stitches (the first row was a real bitch), I got it all sorted out and now I have about 3/4 of a 3/4 length sleeve on one side. I'm hoping to get a lot of work done on it today. I didn't touch it after Tuesday until very late Friday because I had a lot of studying this week. Yay, midterms!

Troubles.

I love this pattern. I truly do. But then I tried to knit it.

Okay, I will take a major part of blame -- I had a very specific stash yarn in mind and pattern calling for bulky weight yarn be damned, I was going to knit with it.

I grabbed some paper, a pencil and my phone (I couldn't be bothered to go into the other room and actually get my real calculator) and set to work. Ugh. What was a thinking! I read through trying to find something that could help with my yarn, but everything seemed a little off. One place told me to CO 112 and stitches! What??! I did some math and came up with 97. That still seemed high, but I gave it a shot. NOPE. Way too long. I was shooting or 16" and ended up somewhere around 25".

So I re-figured. This time I came up with 79 which then lead to me to believe that maybe it was 79 the whole time and I just had a cases of the reversies and switched the numbers. It's the right size now and I'm knitting along, but now all my YOs don't really seem to be slanted in the right direction. I'm trying to ignore my paranoia and just keep going, but that's not working either. I've managed to knit half a row since the paranoia set in. I think I just need to rip back to the ribbing and start again.

I do have to say the yarn is GLORIOUS though. Classic Elite Waterlily in Leaf. Mmm. It was a gift from Lauren ages ago and I've been wanting to make some great out of it.

Ugh.

I was trying to make myself a nice simple banner, but Blogger stretched it all out and made the background ugly and I'm just annoyed. Maybe I'll try again later, but for now, the funky is up there.