Friday, April 28, 2006

Gauge Check?

I am awful about doing gauge swatches. I tend to just dive right in with a yarn that seems close enough to that recommended and hope for the best. This usually works out, thanks to lots of mid-knit fittings and the forgiving tendencies of knit fabric, but occasionally I start knitting and reach a point at which I want to beat myself over the head with my oversized monstrosity of a Spiderweb Capelet. Seriously, I think this needs a picture.



Click it. You won't understand how ridiculously long it is until you notice how long my worktable is and the fact that the fluff will not fit onto it without dangling over the edges. You see that smaller fluff on the spoon handles over there?



That is fluff 2.0. It is about half as long as the original fluff. Specifically, 52 sts to the original version's 92. Of course, it didn't occur to me until I was almost done with the capelet and noticed that I was about to run out of yarn that this thing was perhaps a bit too long. You'd think running out of room on the needles would have given it away first, wouldn't you? Damn, I should have taken a picture of that.



Just in case you were skeptical about the existence of any sort of lace pattern in all that fluff, well, you can sort of see it there. In the large version. Okay, well, you can see YOs and YOs indicate lace, right? >_<


I think I just about used an entire year's worth of "fluff"s in this post. Remind me to never use that word again after this thing is done.

2 comments:

Clive said...

I'm a good boy and do gauge swatches for everything because I'm knitting pretty much for other people and fittings are a rare option.

That looks like a purple triffid/Audrey plant, must be a huge spider in there somewhere!!

Anonymous said...

I just finished the &$%^*# capelet and mine looks just like that. It turns out that there's an error in the pattern. All the stitches that are printed at K YO P YO K YO P in 1 stitch should instead be K P K P in 1 stitch. Mine increased to monstrous proportions.. at the end instead of having 56 stitches, I had 354. It's going to be a .... something. I don't know. Maybe a huge scarf. Maybe a curtain valance.