Monday, May 28, 2007

The Begining of Bob

I was so excited to start the front of my Bob Dobbs sweater. I had so many ideas about how I can challenge my little knitter mind and skill set by tinkering with the perfect techniques to make the perfect sweater. I was convinced that nothing could stop this knitter from producing a masterpiece with ease and finesse. Let's see how that worked out, shall we?

1. Intarsia/Fair Isle
I had this charming notion of how I could just join two colors for the center intarsia panel and work them in fair isle across the face. How could that go wrong? What's that you say? The face would become a double-thick, completely inflexable mass front and center of a potentially negative ease sweater (I'll go into the potential negative ease at a later date)? No way! I'm glad I thought of that before I started!

2. Inarsia/Duplicate stitch
duplicate

See that? That's my duplicate stitch. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to knit the sweater using yarn I already had and just adjusted my needle size to get gauge. That results in a really nice, soft, drapey fabric that just happens to be a thousand times looser than it should be in order to keep the stitches from showing through from beneath the duplicate stitch. I deserve a big "You Suck" sticker for that one.

3. Straight up, no F-ing around Intarsia
I've resigned myself to working the chart using a new strand for each block of color. I'm okay with this. I really like intarsia. My first ever knitting project was intarsia. How hard can it be? This is the chart.

bobchart

Do you see all of those tiny-ass blocks of color? Oh you do? Me too. I think I'm going to have to do some stranding and some duplicate stitch to keep me from going insane, but only in dire circumstances. Here goes.

close2

How about one more for the road?

close

4 comments:

Virtuous said...

Absolutely love your blog!! LOL Your sense of humor is great!

Thanks for coming by to visit mine! What is your e-mail addy? (it wasn't on your profile)

Yep there are no shortcuts to this method! Can't wait to see your FO!

Probably Jane said...

You're braver than me - I would come to loathe that smug, smiling face by the time I was at the end.

I'm sure yours will look grand.

Shannon said...

Good luck on your Bob vest, it is a really nifty knit though. Are those cicular barbells you're using for stitch markers...cause if so that's totally awesome :)

Alma said...

I love the colours you've chosen.
The weaving in of ends can be an exercise in meditation.
It can also be a complete pain in the *ss.
But he will be beautiful when done.

I want to see the kittens!