Workbasket - Progress during recovery

I imagined that it would be easy to keep up with this blog while recovering from surgery. Yaaaaaah… nothing was easy. I didn’t even make huge strides on any of my projects either. Now that I am back, let me catch you up.

WIPs:

Harry Potter blanket

Gah! the stain is still very obvious in photos. Stitching the fabric to the back of the knit blanket was stabilizing it nicely.

The back of the quilt looked very ripple-y. It is also easy to see the “bumps” of the front design elements. Pixie has been instrumental in every aspect during the making of this blanket.

Finally nearly finished with sewing the fabric to the back, I realized that it worked well for the main body of the blanket. But, it would not suit to support the boarder. The fabric would stabilize the knit, but would not support it in the desired shape. As so often happens during my projects, I had to come up with a different idea. I carefully cut all the stitches and then set aside the project while I gave it a thought or two.

12 Days of Christmas quilt

Front view, directly after taking it off the quilt frame.

Back view with all the threads still needing to be cut. There was also areas where the bobbin thread tension was less than optimal. Also there were several areas where the back fabric was definitely not smooth. After clipping the traveling threads, I carefully cut out the stitches with tension issues and areas of aggressive puckering in the back fabric. This project is entirely for my own amusement and for putting out during the holidays. I decided that I putting the stitches back in would just be done by hand. I really enjoy hand sewing, having been doing it since the age of 5. Hopefully proof of project will be coming to you soon.

Pot Luck Cowl

This project has been fairly stress free. I have been only working on it during our Wednesday Google Meet knitting group. I have only restarted this twice. The final time, I let DW choose the order in which the yarns would be knit.

I was hoping to be able to claim completion victory over this project. It was not to be (I spent a good deal of the time tending to Pixie’s needs. She didn’t understand why I was not using her dog-petters appropriately). But, I got close! Next week, for sure.

LB’s Birthday Gift

The story of this project progress is a sad one. As you may have noticed, I had been very carefully placing “life lines” after each 30 row repeat. Not long after these pics were taken, I got to the last row of the repeat and noticed that I had dropped a stitch. :-/ It was a fast runner too! 🙁 (sigh) But all was ok. I only had to take out that repeat. After carefully (my backtracking is always careful), frogging stitches while collecting the beads as they popped off, I made it to the next life line back. Where I made the discovery that I hadn’t actually caught all the stitches with that lifeline. Some of the stitches had already run away down into the next section. I don’t know if I have mentioned before, but each section takes me pretty close to 3 hours to knit. I don’t remember all the exact details (I have probably blocked it from my mind to save my sanity), but this is what I ended up with starting completely over… again.

It was painful. But there is totally a silver lining! In the instructions it says, “using scrap yarn and a provisional cast on 48(56,60,68) sts”. Got it, 68 stitches! Next it says, “PO(4,6,10)PM, and begin leaf chart”. Hmmmmm… what the heck is “PO”? (Just to let you know I had been wondering this same question each time I had started this project) Having originally checked on the inter-webs, I determined it meant I was to “Pearl Off” that many stitches, so 10. It looked super funky, but what do I know. The writer of the pattern is the expert, right?

So this time, I was carefully reading the instructions again. I noticed that right after I was supposed to do something with those 10 stitches, I was to place a stitch marker (PM). If I had just “Pearled off” stitches, there would be nothing on the one side to hold the marker in place. That seemed odd. Back to the hive mind that is the world wide web. There were all kinds of answers to similar questions. Similar enough that their answers might have been the one I was searching for. I don’t remember where I came across it, but it was something to do with the numbers proceeding the parenthesis and in the parenthesis have to do with the amount of stitches to be worked for each size. You would use the # to correspond to the size of project you are working on. Because I had cast on 68 stitches, I would be using the #10.

I wasn’t supposed to PO (pearl off), I was supposed to P (pearl). It wasn’t an O, it was a 0. As that notion was clawing it’s way into my consciousness, I let my eyes travel down the page. Sure enough in the places that it was clear a zero was meant, it looked like the O at the beginning of this pattern. It was a font issue. So! When I started this last time, I pearled 10 stitches on each side of the leaf pattern.

This looks much better and makes infinitely more sense. Between Wednesday, March 31 and Friday, April 2 I had made a decent amount of progress.