Tuesday, January 22, 2008

in fear of the yarn over

firstly, it got welded. no taph i didnt run around like jennifer beals but if someone wants to knit me some leg warmers i could be persuaded. i know someone who might think that was kind of..um..fun. too much information, lets move along.

so its gone off to be read. i just reread chapter three and its not as bad as i thought, so maybe another week? i am on track to meet my own deadline of jan 31st tho so cant complain. its going well.

going less well is the whole fancy silk sock thing. i was right to be afraid. for my non-knitting readers you can sign out now because its going to get a little knit-nerdy and i need some help.

the pattern calls for 64 st on 2.5mm needles. i dont have any of those at the moment, and i want to make it slightly larger, and given what spidey said, i figured i could go up to 3mm needles. also i upped the stitch count by 8 because the lace repeat for the scalloped cuff is a multiple of 8. that gave me 72 stitches on three needles, 24 on each. nice i thought. wrong. the first problem is that that means each needle ends with a yarn over. hmmmm.

as if thats not bad enough, this is what it says to do with round two, where you are just plain knitting, not doing the lace:

"knit, slipping the last st of the rnd from the end of the 3rd needle to the beg of the 1st needle and counting it as the first st of the foll rnd (do not knit it again) to keep the yarnovers aligned vertically, and counting it as the first of the 2 knit sts in the next rep"

once i deciphered that, i thought well how the hell do i slip a yarn over from the end of one needle to the beginning of the next? if anyone can answer that id be amazed!

i decided i would ignore this bit and proceed regardless and see what happens. this is what happens:


it makes a nice scalloped edge for sure, if you are making waving lace socks and its ok not to have your YOs aligned vertically. the rest of this pattern is in vertical lines, it would look silly to have a diagonal cuff. so its going to get frogged. its what i do next that is the issue. again, more help required. do i:

1. wait till i get slightly smaller needles and go up to 80st so that there is not an even number of stitches on each needle, which means that the yarn overs dont fall at the end of needles and i can therefore slip whole stitches, not phantom ones?

2. cast on the same number on these needles and just not divide them evenly, producing the same effect as above?

i do not have what one would call slim calves, so a bit of give in these is essential - im either going to up the stitches or the needle size. should i just do one not the other or is it ok to do both? is 3mm just too chunky for 4ply yarn? and if i go 80st how should i distribute them so i never see a YO at the end of a needle? (see, theres that maths thing again).

if someone who knows what the hell im talking about could give me some advice id be grateful.

k xx

7 comments:

Trent said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Michelle said...

I dunno. I have enough problems with just one crochet hook and one loop.

Good luck with finding out though!

Rose Red said...

Umm, I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm going to give it a go...

I'm knitting a sock at the moment on 2.5mm needles, using 64 stitches. They're toe up, so I may increase another 4 stitches as I go up the leg, but so far so good. And I'm a fairly tight knitter. So I probably wouldn't go up stitch number AND stick size if I were you - I'd only do one or the other. I think 3mm is probably too big for 4ply, unless you are a really tight knitter!

Re slipping the yo, I'm not sure why you can't slip it, the yarn is over the needle, so you just slip it like any other stitch? Or am I missing something?

If you don't like the yo at the end of the needle, you can divide the stitches across the 3 needles in any other way that makes sense with the pattern. If you need to, you can use stitch markers for where the end of each needle should be if you followed the way the pattern says. I do that all the time (I hate yo at end of needles too!!). Hope that helps.

2paw said...

I had a yfwd/yo at the end of my needles when I knitted the Pomatomus socks and I had to actually knit the first stitch on the next needle with the yarn in front or forwarded or whatever you like to call it, THEN I slipped this inbetween stitch onto the second needle. I know what you mean about non existent stitch. It doesn't appear till you have worked the first stitch on the next needle. Hope this helps!!! It was a pain in the neck, but I just had to live with it. The colour is lovely!!
Good welding news too!!

Bells said...

Ugh. I've had one of *those* days so I'm not capable of deciphering let alone thinking. I will leave it to others.

But I must say, if I ever meet *someone* I'm going to quietly giggle to myself and starting humming those opening bars...he he

DrK said...

thanks for the help, i think part of my problem may not be doing yarn overs properly, i know how to do them before another stitch but am not sure how to do them when theres nothing after, but what rosered and 2paw said here makes sense. i am going to sydney tomorrow and to a certain yarn store so i will get the right size needles and recast on/redistribute and take it from there.

and bells, last night someone kept humming that little tune himself and doing dancing on the spot motions. funny!

Georgie said...

Sorry, can't help with the knitting issews, except to say my first thought was to redistribute the sts and use markers for the needles should end in the pattern (what RR said).

But I am getting a huge cackle out of thoughts of leg warmers and sweaty hair being flung about!