Oblique
Oblique
This way to the yarn porn. I cast on for Veronik Avery's Oblique cardigan last weekend, and after a bit of a false start, have been knitting at it every time I have a spare moment since.
The false start resulted from trying to follow the pattern - which requires you to work several different lace patterns, some in eight-row repeats and some in four, at the same time. Even using my handy "kachga-kacha"-style row counter, I managed to get off-count to the point where I had to frog back to the twisted rib border, not once but twice.
So I sat down with Open Office Calc (a freeware Excel-type spreadsheet program) and the knitting symbol font from Aire River Design, and charted the damned thing, which I should have done in the first place.
Some people prefer their knitting instructions written; I'm in the camp that finds charts much easier to follow, not so much because they provide a graphic representation of what the stitch pattern will look like (they do, but I can't always see it), but because I can slide a wide Post-It up the page as I go, row by row, and see right where I am. That, and stitch markers to demark the change from one stitch pattern to the next, and I'm set.
Things have gone much better since, and the sweater back is knitting up fast. I've adjusted the pattern slightly to account for my short-waisted body and the fact that I like my sweaters even longer than the pattern suggests, delaying the start of the waist shaping by several rows and reducing the number of rows between the above-the-waist decreases by two.
I'm loving the way the yarn (Elann.com's very affordable Incense wool-silk-bamboo blend) works up in this pattern; it's soft and smooth and less elastic than pure wool, and it really shows off the stitch patterns; the diagonal lace in particular is sharp and crisp. This stuff would be terrific for cabling, and it's relative light weight suggests that even a long cardigan will keep its shape without sagging or stretching.
The pattern itself is fun to knit - regular enough to memorize, if you're more disciplined than I am, but with enough changes in each row to keep me on my toes. And I love the textures that result. If I continue knitting at the pace I've set, I should finish the sweater by the end of the month, while there's still plenty of cardigan weather left in the season.
Lessons learned: Even with the charts, I managed to get distracted enough (I knit while watching all of Babylon 5, in great marathon sittings) to screw up one of the diagonal panels and not notice it till I was six rows past the error. Rather than frog the whole thing, I gritted my teeth, took a deep breath and dropped the stitches for that section back to where I'd made the error; then I slipped the live stitches onto DPNs and worked them back and forth on the long loops of loose yarn until I made it back to the top. It looked hopelessly sloppy and loose at first, but once I got back to the top row and slid the stitches back onto the circs, everything tightened up and smoothed out nicely. Looking at it now, I can't even see where the error occurred. And it's always good to have a new repair technique in my bag of knitting tricks.