Ruthless Knitting

Thanks for all your kind comments on Otto the Turkey! He did a good job acting as our Thanksgiving centerpiece, and I left him to live with our host, my sister-in-law Amy, who seems quite fond of him. I’ve been working on the pattern and hope to have it posted by the weekend.

Yesterday, I managed to get Lucie’s stocking finished and blocked.

The stocking came out quite well in all respects but one — it’s huge! I’m not quite sure what happened. Strike that. I know exactly what happened, I just don’t know why. It’s clear that my gauge was off, since the stocking is larger than it ought to be. But I made this stocking last year for David, and I used the same needles and yarn this time, and yet it came out much larger. Two explanations occur to me:

(1) I knit more loosely on Stocking Number 2. This is a reasonable explanation, as I knit David’s stocking as a secret Christmas gift last year in short bursts in my office, always fearful that he would come home suddenly and discover me working on it. The tension could have made my gauge tighter.

(2) I actually used smaller needles last time. This is also a distinct possibility. I wrote in my knitting journal last year that I used size 8 needles for this pattern, but I followed that note with a significant notation: “(?).” This tell-tale question mark casts some serious doubt on the trustworthiness of my records. When I cast on this time around, I was quite confident that I remembered using a very specific and unique pair of size 8 needles to knit David’s stocking, but as the stocking got larger and larger and larger, I began to doubt the accuracy of my memory.

Either way, I figure it’s okay that the stocking is very large, because Lucie is the oldest and currently only grandchild, and she gets more presents than anyone else anyway. Kids today need bigger stockings, right? I will press on with the other two stockings, but I will try size 7 needles for the next one.

Since I first posted about this stocking a few weeks ago, I’ve received e-mails from three separate people who tell me that members of their family have versions of the same pattern knit by mothers and grandmothers decades ago. All of them wanted to knit stockings of their own to match. Unfortunately, the pattern is no longer available. It was once part of a kit by Bernat called Santa Claus Stocking Pak, and all I have is a photocopy of my own grandmother’s very bedraggled personal copy. Bernat, take note: the public demands that you reissue this pattern! (And I demand that the reissued pattern have larger charts.)

Edited to add: I got permission from Bernat yesterday to make the pattern available on my site! I’ll have that posted in a few days.

While we were in Indiana for Thanksgiving, I continued plugging away on the back of the herringbone sweater, and this morning I finally made it to the armhole shaping. I’m hoping to have the back finished by the weekend, at which point I will only have one piece to go. And the seaming up. And perhaps elbow patches.

Sorry for the less-than-inspirational picture. The sweater is not at its most inspirational stage, though I’m still more or less enjoying the project, and I do hold out hope that it will be done before Christmas — though there is the small matter of those other two stockings to knit, so we’ll see.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Finished Objects, Projects in Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.