Frustrating Friday
It has not been happy days here in the knitting world. I thought I was so clever because I have actually cast on both of the yarns I bought at the Flagstaff Fiber Festival. Pride goeth before….
I cast on the Enjoy Flowers by Knitting for Breakfast. I am not sure how many times I need to remind myself to use 6000 stitch markers in some patterns. There are directions to increase rounds but no stitch counts so I totally got confused. The instructions give you a stitch count after all the colorwork which is about 50 rounds. I need much more hand holding please on a pattern.
This will be frogged and I will begin again:( I am about 30 rounds into the pattern. On a more positive note I think my floats were doing quite well.
I have begun the Knitmas in July 2026 pattern by Nomadic Knits. I have done a few of her projects and enjoyed them all. One of the biggest issues is I did not carefully read the yarn requirements (also there was quite a bit of push to buy one of the kits available for purchase so the yarn requirements were not immediately obvious). The main color needs 600 yards. I thought I would need 1 skein for the main color and 4 mini skeins for the other bits. A typical skein of fingering weight is about 430 yards. I decided to forge ahead and see how my yarn usage was. I can contact the yarn seller and see if I can buy another skein. Color dye matching will not be overly important because the main color sections are broken up in between the mini skeins. A slight variation in color lot will not be too noticeable.
Another issue is the cast on. This designer loves the German Twisted Cast On sometimes referred to as the Old Norwegian Cast On. I HATE this cast on. I have tried it numerous times and watched lots of videos on how to properly do it. I think it is too fiddly and in reality not all that stretchy. I found a chart in all my explorations listing the cast on methods and their stretch factor. The German only gives you 5%. Only other knitters would even begin to look at my cast on edge. I.e. normal people not knitters will never even look. I am not sure why the edge of a scarf would need a stretch factor except the designer likes it. I tried casting on that way and gave up after about 10 stitches. It probably did not help that I was using straight needles. I rarely use straight needles anymore so there is a relearning curve every time I pick them up. I just went with my tried and true long tail cast on.
This is not a mystery knit along since the entire pattern was released so I fail to understand the lack of useful pictures from the test knitters. Not one of them include a picture of the full item (or least ½ of it). Also they left very few notes in Ravelry. This scarf is knit on the bias which I did not truly understand until I watched 2 different videos from the designer (thank goodness she showed more of the actual knitted item). Honestly if there is an opportunity to misunderstand something in a knitting pattern it will be me every time who does.
The designer does not suggest stitch markers in the pattern notes itself but does have a video suggesting their use and how she uses them. Um…if you need to use them could you make a note of that in the pattern. For gosh sakes the whole first page of the pattern includes 10 or more helpful hints, but the use of stitch markers is not mentioned anywhere. I will now be hunting up more of my stitch markers to help keep me on track with the pattern.
In the end both of these projects have bene frogged to be started again from scratch.
