The Agony of Defeat

Now that the Winter Olympics are officially here, the Knitting Olympics have begun. For my project, I chose a lace scarf called Branching Out from Knitty.com. Please note that this is my very first lace anything and that I am, in general, an over-achiever. Familiar with Hermione from the Harry Potter series? Picture her grown up and you get the general idea...

Not only do I pick lace, I choose to do it in mohair. I cast on and frogged the damn thing 5 times before I realized there was no way I was ever going to be able to see my stitches in all the fuzz. So, I ended up buying some gorgeous Noro in teal that's a lovely wool/silk blend in order to save my sanity. Things were going well until this woman was like "blah blah blah" at my LYS and distracted me to the point that I realized I'd lost count of where I was. This scarf really is a solitary pursuit with counting not only of how many rows in the repeat, but also how many stitches in each row due to the pattern involved. I frogged it once at the LYS, and was getting going again when I got home, and just as I realized that I'd missed a stitch somewhere in the last row, the phone rang and I gave up trying to figure out where so I frogged it a second time. Not to worry though, I think I finally know what I was doing wrong, so I have a very good chance of doing it right the third time.

The whole thing just put me in a funk, coupled with having to drive the 405 to go out with M and friends for dinner (and other less fun things that no one wants to hear about anyway). So after dinner, I finished the left front of the cropped bolero by Veronik Avery and that perked me right up.

I have to say for all the knitting and frogging I did today, I learned quite a few stitches I'd been avoiding for fear they'd be too difficult, and would like to recommend this book, as it was extremely helpful in grasping how to do them. Don't know what I'd have done without it.