It's all gone a bit quiet on the Glaswegian front I'm afraid. Tuesday night was our 'Knit out at the Movies' night - we saw Amazing Grace at the Grosvenor on Ashton Lane. Lovely film - really good to knit to. I took along Betty, but managed to pull several stitches off the needle just taking her out of my bag, so I slid them back on and decided that a darkened cinema wasn't the place to check that they were all still there. Luckily, I'd also taken along a pair of the resident radiologist's socks that he'd put his toe through. The cinema is definitely the place for putting a new toe on a sock, just pick up stitches from below the hole, rip back to there and keep going round and round, remembering to decrease as necessary.
Betty is going to be slow progress and hard work. The pattern requires that on the right side, each stitch is knitted front and back, then on the wrong side, its k2tog, p2tog all the way along. To add to this very slow knitting, for some reason, my row gauge is way off. My stitch gauge is spot on, which is why I've not changed needles, but the row gauge requires 23 rows to 4 inches and I'm getting 32 rows to 4 inches. Not a trivial difference, it meants that I will be knitting one third more rows to get the required length! I've decided to keep going but I'm altering the pattern to take account of the row difference; I've worked out at what length the increases and decreases should occur and am placing them accordingly. This is going fine at the moment, but she's got set-in sleeves so I'm going to have to learn how to recalculate these... I'm lead to believe it involves graph paper... I'm a scientist, how hard can it be???
I'm starting to suspect that the row gauge problem might be due to my yarn substitution. The pattern calls for Yorkshire Tweed DK which is discontinued, and Rowan recommends Scottish Tweed DK as an alternative. The thing is I've got Rowanspun DK and I don't think it has as much 'body' as the other two. Can anyone tell me if this is definitely the case? In the meantime, I'll slog away on Betty and try to take some photos over the weekend.
Other plans for the weekend involve painting the garden fence (shhhh - not that the resident radiologist know this yet) - hope the weather stays as nice as it's meant to be.
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The knitting, crochet and random thoughts of a bench biologist...
1 comment:
Hi Mary, I am afraid my memories of Betty seem to be hazy now but looking at the pattern now I seem to be working out the decreases as appearing on the RS rows and I think this is probably how I worked them. I think if I did do any on the WS my inclination might have been to work a sort of cast off decrease to make it more manageable.
Sorry I can't be of more help but I can tell you that Yorkshire Tweed is very bulky, certainly much bulkier than Rowanspun DK I would say and that would probably account for your row difference. I would think the Rowanspun should make for a lovely jacket though as my Betty is really only a winter garment because of the bulk.
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