Everybody's Favourite Savior of "Slack!"  

Posted

That's right, folks! We have a legend in our midst!


May I introduce to you the famous J.R. "Bob" Dobbs [who appears courtesy of the Church of the SubGenius]! J.R. here is part of my latest project, the "Bob Bag," which I'm sure you all remember me referring to many other times. Well, it's finally underway... again!

     The reason I say "again" is because I actually started it a few days ago,  got about eight rows into his lovely mug... and realized I royally screwed up. So I had to completely unravel all my work and start a-new. It's alright, though - It was a real learning experience!

     You see, I have never knitted anything from a picture pattern. Mine are always written out [including the only time I used a picture pattern in the past, when I was just learning how to knit, and my awesome mother wrote the whole pattern out for me], but this time I realized I couldn't just wing it, so I sat down to write the pattern out myself. That's only part of the battle, too. I still have to think while I'm knitting because of the multiple colours and multiple strands of said colours. Yes, I said multiple strands.

      This is not only my first experience with what is called "intarsia" knitting, but also "fair isle" knitting, and it's just about as complicated as you can get, unless your Scandinavian and fancy knitting yourself one of those gorgeous sweaters. While I am only knitting with three colours, I have five strands yarn going. It's my own, personal mutation of several knitting methods, I guess! Like I said, I'm not going by any pattern here, just the gridded picture from this awesome book by the amazing domiknitrix, so I don't really know if I've done something wrong until after I've continued to knit and I come across a deformity.

     It is my [non]professional opinion that knitting is WAY harder than sewing. Besides the obvious fact that you can finish a project much faster, with sewing, if you make a mistake you pretty much notice right away. You can also fix a single area without undoing the whole project... Not so much with knitting. With knitting, you don't always know if you've made a mistake until your about to finish the bottom of a sweater, only to realize you forgot to include the arm holes. The only choice you have [that I know of] is just to suck it up, un-pick all your hours of work, and start over.


     Un-picking is a horribly tedious project in and of itself, that to me just feels like salt in the wound. It's like your yarn is mocking you, reminding you of how much you suck. What, nobody elses' yarn talks to them? Well, that's besides the point! [I might mention, though, that it would seem my knitting needles talk to my cats - taunting them, looking to start trouble....] The point is that it's extremely frustrating and often tempts me to just give up. Not this time! I took a little break from it for a couple days, then came back and sat down to logically think the whole thing through.


     So here I am, three days into the project and so far, so good! I'm still learning as I'm going, but it's going pretty well, all things considered. I'm just under half way through "Bob's" face, leaving off this afternoon at the start of his eyebrows. Here come the complicated facial features! Weeee! It should be ok, though. I'm starting to get better at thinking ahead as to where I should leave which strand of which colour, so that I don't have to unpick the last row, only to re-do it carrying a strand so that it ends up in the right place for the next row. Phew.

     Here's hoping that I really am doing as well as I think I am, and that my next blog update will be a couple days from now, telling you all that I'm finished his face and it's all smooth, blue knitting from there!

Until then, "[Screw] 'Em If They Can't Take A Joke!" ...I've got some Project Runway to watch!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14, 2010 . You can leave a response and follow any responses to this entry through the Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) .

0 comments

Post a Comment