Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Tunic With The Long Name

I cast on Crisp Rectangle Tunic Top, from Fitted Knits. I've broken the Fitted Knits seal. From now on, it's going to be all knits that are fitted. Plus some socks.

That's probably not true. After all, once the cold weather comes again, I'll be back at my Kim Hargreaves, not to mention Dave's Annual Christmas Sweater. But after the twelve hours of finishing that was Cherry (more on that some other time), I could do with some raglans.


The yarn is Knitpicks Cotlin, which I'm pretty psyched about. It's not as soft as the other cotton blends I've knit with recently, but the drape is fantastic, and really, shouldn't this tunic be in linen? Seriously. I'm confident it'll soften up with the multiple washings.

I'm finding knitting the purl rows at random a little intimidating, as I really like the way it looks in the photo and want it to look exactly like that, but it's fun. The pattern itself, so far, is a little mindless, so figuring out the placement of the purl bits gives me something to do.

HOWEVER. I had heard that Fitted Knits has a fair amount of errata, so fine. I was prepared for that. But the short rows as described in this pattern are not at all intuitive. It's fine, once I realized that what I was doing wasn't making any sense, I checked various message boards and it was explained to me that the short rows exist between the actual rows, but do not count as rows themselves. This was confusing.

I'm not thrown off Fitted Knits, not by any means. I'm just doubly prepared to doublecheck things that don't make sense.

ANYWAY.

So I was hanging with Eddie Izzard at his fantastic house (lots of light wood paneling, mysterious stairs and hallways and porches) and he was being all funny and then he pulled open all these secret drawers filled with--wait for it--yarn. And was about to share his secret for dyeing yarns with halos of a different color than the underlying strand (think The Fibre Company's Terra), when all of a sudden....Dave woke me up.

Eddie Izzard. And yarn. And secrets to dyeing. In one dream.

Dave's in the doghouse.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

could you explain this whole "the short rows are between the rows" thing...this pattern is confusing me and my friend decided she wants it for her birthday...

Nikki Van De Car said...

I will do my very best--this is actually frogged at this point, because I wasn't making it long enough and didn't want to start all over again.

What it is, is you knit the short row, so knit to where you wrap, turn, and knit back to the beginning of the row, and THEN you knit across all the stitches in the row--and that complete row counts as a row; the short row doesn't.

Does that make sense??