Start Big

I always want to get the worst over with first.  I knit my sweater bodies (even flat) in one piece to the armholes whenever possible.  It makes every row a bit of an undertaking (I use markers to help me have progress intervals), but once I get to the armholes, I’ve knit the lower body of the entire sweater!  It makes much more sense to me to start a shawl from the widest point rather than to start small and get big.  Well, sometimes it is really fun to see things grow from the inside out, but it always means that I get to a point where my energy, time, or interest flags.

I started this new piece on Wednesday.  I thought it would be fun to work it from the outside in–it is a square scarf.  I cast on 440 stitches.  On reflection, I should have started with 432 to fit with my stitch pattern, not 440, so my actual knitting is differing slightly from the pattern I’m writing, which uses the “should have” number.  So I cast on and joined and started working the pattern, decreasing every third round.  For some reason stitches worked in the round never seem to take as long to knit as when working flat.  I’ve got the piece divided into quarters, which means that I’m always only thinking about the quarter I’m working on.  I didn’t knit much on Friday evening, but I knit a bit while my mom and I were getting our pedicures (I’ve got a pinky lilac and pale moss green toe nails; Mom has orange and red with a bit of glitter on the orange big toes).  Saturday Mitch and I enjoyed a couple of short-ish pod casts after lunch and I knit, and then I knit a bit last night.  On my run I calculated that I have worked about 19% of the total decreases and rounds.  It was surprisingly difficult to work the rounds part out in my head as I was running, and after I finally did it, I decided I should finish calculations when I was sitting down.  Fortunately, I don’t really see any need to calculate anything else right now.  But I’ve gotten rid enough stitches that each side of the scarf is about the equivalent of a hat.  Since it is always getting smaller, I expect my forward progress to be fairly quick now.

The downside of this approach is that I think I should have made my second contrast color stripe narrower.  And now I have to decide whether to rip it back or not.  I know I did it on Friday night (during Under the Gunn and my martini).  Now I’m going to put it onto waste yarn and take pictures and give it a quick block when I do my Sunday ironing and make a decision.  Once you come upon a problem like this, it is better not to continue until you reach a resolution.  That’s probably the biggest problem with starting big–failure a mis-calculation is a little harder to face.

And as I have this out I decided to see what the blocked gauge it–because I’ve just been working with unblocked information, and I find that instead of 5.5 sts/in I am at 5 sts/in, and not surprisingly my row gauge is also different.  But I like the corner I’ve gotten, so I’m okay with my rate of decrease.  May have to change the decrease rate as I get nearer the center.  Something to think about when I run on Tuesday.

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