Cuff Take 2

This is the second sock of this pair.

And this is the second time I've completed the cuff. Why?, you ask. Do you see the needle in the lower part of the pic? It's not the same as the others. No, it's not! It's half a millimetre smaller --oops--bigger . In this case that matters. I completed the whole cuff before I realised I was using the wrong size needles. Then I agonised for a while about what to do. When I looked at it objectively I had to admit that the tension was noticeably different. So I ripped it out and started again. Now I can get on with the rest of the sock. The sizes are printed on the needles, but I just wasn't paying enough attention.

Trial and Error

My friend S sent me a pattern for a crochet bag after I shared this. It's from Katy Bevan's book, Instant Expert Crochet. Great! This pattern looks a lot like a favourite crochet net bag of mine. It lives in my handbag and is perfect for those times when I just need to stop and buy this and that at the supermarket. Yesterday I decided to have a go at it. I pulled out some indigo-dyed 8-ply cotton, untangled and wound off the skeins and felt ready to go.

Here's where the "trial and error" bit comes in. The bag consists of three main sections: a circular base, a net body and a top border with handles. I had a quick look at the pattern for the base. I thought I had the idea, so off I went. After a few rounds the pattern seemed to have settled into a steady pattern of increases, so I just kept going . . . until it didn't look right. I checked the pattern, ripped out my work and tried again. Still not right. OK, now I did what I should have done in the first place. I printed off the pattern--I'd been just glancing at the PDF document to get the right idea. With the pattern in front of me and a pen at the ready I carefully stitched through the instructions round by round, underlining the variation and ticking off each row as I finished it. The result was quite a convincing circular base.

The body of the bag is made up of a simple crochet net. The same pattern is repeated sixteen times to form a simple cylinder. Off I went. Now my problem was simply the repetitive nature of the task: the same six stitch pattern over and over. Twelve repetitions per round. Sixteen rounds. I marked them off as went. I took a break after every round or two. Round and around. Ho hum! It looks pretty good, but I'm not going to be making a lot of these bags. Every now and then I wondered how tall the bag would be. As I got to the last few rounds I was starting to doubt the pattern, especially in comparison with my old favourite which I'd slung over the chair next to me, but I persisted.

Sixteen rounds of net completed, I looked at the instructions for the border and handles. I couldn't quite make sense of them. There was an abreviation that I didn't recognise. All of a sudden I thought that this might be a US pattern. In that case I had been mis-interpreting every stitch of the sixteen rounds I'd just completed. I thought about adding height by working a few more rounds. I took another break, looked at the bag again and decided to rip it out. In ten minutes my afternoon's work was gone. There I was with two neatly wound balls of indigo-dyed cotton on the table in front of me.

This morning I had another look at the pattern. It doesn't seem to be written in US terms. The crochet hook size is 4 mm. There are no "single crochet" stitches which is always a give-away. Maybe the bag would have stretched to shape. I don't know. I still think it's a good pattern. I'll probably try it again some time--probably with a few modifications. Oh, and I won't try to get it done in an afternoon. And next time I try a new pattern I will remember that golden rule which I repeat to my students over and over and over again: "The first step is always to read the pattern carefully from beginning to end!"

Not Quite Right

I promised to post a picture of the green yarn I plied up yesterday. As it turns it, it's not quite right--or at least not the way I intended it to be. This is actually two skeins: a two ply and a navaho ply. Here's the story . . . On Sunday, when I'd finished plying, I went on to spin some merino. I wanted it to be very fine--suitable for lace--so I used the smallest whorl on my spinning wheel. That means that I get lots of twist for every time I pedal the wheel. I mustn't have been quite focussed when I got home, because I didn't change the setting and sat down to spin the rest of the green. It wasn't until I went to ply it last night that I noticed that it was too tightly spun. There are lots of creative ways I could have solved the problem, but I didn't feel like doing anything creative. I just plied it up to balance the yarn as it was. You can see in the centre of the pic that one of the strands is smaller and tighter than the other. I had a bit of that tightly spun single left, so I navaho plied it to use it up. Now I need to find a good use for some overspun navaho plied yarn--it's a bit like very pretty fancy string! Hmmm, maybe a bag strap or something would be good.