There are times when I am delusional about what I’m knitting. I start making something and it isn’t turning out quite like I expected and wanted and yet I keep going. That happened with the BIG sweater that I made for Pete. I should have known, while I was knitting it, that it was way too big. But I pressed on, thinking that a little washing will make it shrink down in size. Never mind that it was 4 times wider than it needed to be. So I finished it, contemplated it, decided to try to shrink the heck out of it, and succeeded only in making an enormous sweater that maybe can work as a blanket.
It happened again this past month. I wanted to make a cool Harry Potter themed tie. I used a pattern for a book mark. The bottom of the tie would be this cool Hufflepuff Badger tracks pattern and the rest of the tie would be solid. I’m knitting away, using a technique that I’ve never done before (double knitting) and wondering why my book mark is the size of a book. Ever optimistic, my mind puts aside any misgivings I may have and I continue merrily along. Surely everything will sort itself out in the end. It takes me an entire month and I finally finish the cool pattern. And then I hold it up to see how it looks.
It’s enormous, the knitting is sloppy, the fabric is loose. Even after this realization, I forge bravely ahead and start doing the solid part. And now I’m finally admitting defeat. I just don’t like it. The tie is too wide; I’m never going to wear a tie that wide. The knitting is too loose; shrinking it down (which is what I though I would have to do) may make it thinner but it will probably ruin the proportions and make the fabric thick and stiff.
Maybe because I am a product knitter I dismissed all the doubts I had earlier. I want the thing to be done. But now I realize I don’t want this thing. I do want a tie like this. But I’m going to have to start all over again and try to knit tighter. I looked again at the pattern and now I know what one of my problems was. I read the needle size as 2. I know I am a loose knitter and so did my tie with size 1 needles. What I didn’t do was read past the 2 to see that what was given was 2mm. That means a size 0. Which means, given my tendency to knit loose, that I would need a 00 or a 000 (none of which I have).
I hate ripping out. But I just might need to do it this time. Take the whole thing back down to the yarn. Sigh…..