Ruthless Knitting

I wanted plain stockinette, and I got it, by golly. Since mid-week, I have read Harry Potter (books five and six — I had fallen behind!) and knit the back of a sweater, which is now finished and blocked, though the armholes are too long. Also, there’s a section near the top where the yarn, a single-ply, became mysteriously thinner, as though half the ply were missing. I knit with it anyway, which, you know, duh. It looks bad, and I’m going to have to rip it out. All told, though, I only have to rip and reknit about four inches. Also, I have to find the band from that ball of yarn so I can alert the Nashua people to its defectiveness.

Meanwhile, having caught up with Harry Potter and declared to David my prediction of what will happen at the end of the final installment, I was ready to begin the front of the sweater, which is far more interesting than the back. I give you the first six inches or so of the sweater I am calling “Buster”:

The Buster sweater is named after the Buster character on the TV show “Arrested Development,” who often wears argyle. On one episode, he wore this wonderful argyle sweater that was patterned only on one side of the front. That was my inspiration for this design, though I’ve come a long way from the original.

The intarsia is going pretty well so far. My technique is more or less my own invention, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s a normal one, since it works pretty well. (Note to self: read a book on intarsia sometime.) I try not to be too picky about keeping all the dangly bits on the back in order or fixing the lumpy stitches on the front, since I know that it will all get fixed in time.

Because I know that you are curious, here is the back side. Please note that this is what the strands look like when they are not tangled; they tend to look far worse than this most of the time.

You can see in the picture above that I made a chart, but once I got a few rows in I didn’t need to do more than glance at it occasionally, since the pattern is very predictable. I am hoping to get a few more diamonds done this weekend, but my shoulder is a little achy from all the knitting and I should probably take a break or get something going on smaller needles.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007 at 11:39 am and is filed under 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.