I've been participating in a MKAL for the past few weeks - White Light, by Jenny Faifel.
The first clue dropped on 2 April, and it was completely charming knitting, and I zoomed along with it without having to beweird about dedicated to knitting all the time, and finished it a day and a bit early. I got antsy while waiting for the second clue to drop, and started this:
Then clue #2 dropped on 11 April, and I was off and running, but...more slowly. Which confused me a bit. As fun as colourwork is, juggling two balls is a bit of a pain, and clue #2 had me cut the contrast colour and zip along with just the main. That should have sped me up a bit, since I was no longer futzing with yarn every two rows. And yet, when clue #3 dropped on 16 April, I still wasn't done with clue #2. I mentally shrugged and wrote it off as a consequence of end-of-term - that week was sort of extra busy with marking, and preparing final exams, and invigilating those exams, and then marking those exams, and all the associated paperwork chores of finishing off a semester. (There was an additional step this time, because somehow I messed up with some grade submissions, sigh.) Last Friday I was well and truly done for the rest of the month, so I let the incredibly satisfying feeling of being caught up with work wash over me, and then turned my attention to making that happen with this MKAL, hoping to at least be done with clue #2 before clue #4 went live.
I knit and knit and knit (punctuated by bits of household chores - much to my dismay, things do not clean themselves), and yesterday I was approaching the end of clue #2, which was great, since clue #4 dropped today, so I thought I'd be able to make it and be only one clue behind schedule. As I was working the latter portion of clue #2, I reflected on how long that particular bit of the project had felt. Part of it was likely due to me being behind, but it had seemed like rather a lot of knitting. A lot of knitting for one week, and these MKALs aren't usually set up to be a knit-so-fast-you-set-your-needles-on-fire sort of production. I wondered if the lack of colour changing had pulled a bit of mental trickery on me - maybe without the usual landmarks, it was harder to see progress? But the single coloured bit had finished with a stretch of an eyelet pattern, and that should have achieved the same sort of chunking effect that colour changes would.
I looked over at my remaining yarn, and really looked at it, and noticed something. My main colour was pretty severely depleted. I didn't bother getting up to weigh it - just kept knitting - but it looked to be smaller than my remaining contrast colour, and that was not good, because I'd already looked at clue #3, and I knew there was another stretch of main-colour-only coming. Finishing clue #2 should put me at about the halfway point, so I shouldn't have used more than half of my main by then.
I went back to the pattern clue to see if there was anything that needed to be done once I'd finished up the section I was one repeat away from being finished, and that's when I saw it. I'd misread an instruction.
This is what I had. See the stretch with the eyelets? I'd worked that repeat eight times.
The pattern instruction was to work it three times.
No wonder my main colour was looking a little light - I'd thrown an extra 40 rows in! Which, of course, meant that I would need to rip back to reclaim that yarn.
Out came the needle. Out came hours of stitches.
It's fixed now, and I'm trying to catch up again. Maybe I'll be able to get clue #2 finished today.
The first clue dropped on 2 April, and it was completely charming knitting, and I zoomed along with it without having to be
Then clue #2 dropped on 11 April, and I was off and running, but...more slowly. Which confused me a bit. As fun as colourwork is, juggling two balls is a bit of a pain, and clue #2 had me cut the contrast colour and zip along with just the main. That should have sped me up a bit, since I was no longer futzing with yarn every two rows. And yet, when clue #3 dropped on 16 April, I still wasn't done with clue #2. I mentally shrugged and wrote it off as a consequence of end-of-term - that week was sort of extra busy with marking, and preparing final exams, and invigilating those exams, and then marking those exams, and all the associated paperwork chores of finishing off a semester. (There was an additional step this time, because somehow I messed up with some grade submissions, sigh.) Last Friday I was well and truly done for the rest of the month, so I let the incredibly satisfying feeling of being caught up with work wash over me, and then turned my attention to making that happen with this MKAL, hoping to at least be done with clue #2 before clue #4 went live.
I knit and knit and knit (punctuated by bits of household chores - much to my dismay, things do not clean themselves), and yesterday I was approaching the end of clue #2, which was great, since clue #4 dropped today, so I thought I'd be able to make it and be only one clue behind schedule. As I was working the latter portion of clue #2, I reflected on how long that particular bit of the project had felt. Part of it was likely due to me being behind, but it had seemed like rather a lot of knitting. A lot of knitting for one week, and these MKALs aren't usually set up to be a knit-so-fast-you-set-your-needles-on-fire sort of production. I wondered if the lack of colour changing had pulled a bit of mental trickery on me - maybe without the usual landmarks, it was harder to see progress? But the single coloured bit had finished with a stretch of an eyelet pattern, and that should have achieved the same sort of chunking effect that colour changes would.
I looked over at my remaining yarn, and really looked at it, and noticed something. My main colour was pretty severely depleted. I didn't bother getting up to weigh it - just kept knitting - but it looked to be smaller than my remaining contrast colour, and that was not good, because I'd already looked at clue #3, and I knew there was another stretch of main-colour-only coming. Finishing clue #2 should put me at about the halfway point, so I shouldn't have used more than half of my main by then.
I went back to the pattern clue to see if there was anything that needed to be done once I'd finished up the section I was one repeat away from being finished, and that's when I saw it. I'd misread an instruction.
This is what I had. See the stretch with the eyelets? I'd worked that repeat eight times.
The pattern instruction was to work it three times.
No wonder my main colour was looking a little light - I'd thrown an extra 40 rows in! Which, of course, meant that I would need to rip back to reclaim that yarn.
Out came the needle. Out came hours of stitches.
It's fixed now, and I'm trying to catch up again. Maybe I'll be able to get clue #2 finished today.
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