The Irrationality of Startitis

It's not like I don't have enough to do with my Dad's vest (going okay, even though I had to rip back the whole front – 40,555 stitches gone *weeps*, but still manageable at 833 stitches per day to go), my Mum's Lead or Follow scarf (getting more exhausting by the stitch and I have 3,685 of those to go in the next week and a half and then still the blocking, where I can just hope that it's done in a day, because otherwise I'll be sleeping on the floor... the wooden floor), or my Mum's Elfine socks (977 stitches per day, again manageable, but now that the first one is finished, kinda boring. I know that pattern by heart now, though, so it makes good TV knitting).

But no. I have to start something completely unrelated. Not enough that I had a little incident with the Koigu and the new entrelac pattern during the holidays, or that when I first got here, I was so enamoured with the rests of all my projects that I started a left-overs afghan, noooo. Now I had to start yet another afghan.

The yarn is Schachenmayr's Extra, 100% wool, 125m/50g in the colours white (3524), burgundy (3535) and jaspé wine (3533) so far. I ordered it when it was on sale at an online shop for one (read that again, ONE) Euro a skein, when it normally retails for 3 or 3.30€ and got thirty skeins, five in white, fifteen in burgundy and ten in the jaspé wine. Very pretty, they work well together, but then I started thinking and planning and walking slowly but steadily into my downfall.

The first clue was that I started looking at other colours that would go well with the ones I already had. I finally decided on a lavender (krokus, 3651) and grey tone (email meliert, 3550). Now, of course, I needed to know how much to order of each of these. So I started knitting.

7,200 stitches later, I knew that each block would take about 57g of yarn and I would be just fine if I had 10 skeins of each main colour (burgundy, wine, lavender and grey) and the five skeins of white for the centre. The other five skeins of wine are now reserved for the crocheting (probably crocheting, I'm not sure about that yet) together of the blocks and the border for the whole afghan. So I ordered the lavender when I found it pretty cheap on ebay (1.55€ a skein, still a good price), but haven't had any luck with the grey yet. But I have time.

Then I started playing around with the possibilities these amounts of yarn give me in terms of pattern combinations. I already know that I want the blocks to be log cabin squares, but with five colours there are still incredible amounts of possibilities, but I think I've found a few that will combine nicely and work out as a whole.





And those I then combined to get this overall pattern. Size should be around 1.94m x 1.40m (~ 6'6'' x 4'8'') and it 'only' has a staggering 252,000 stitches.



Of course this isn't the first try at those diagrams. I already tried a practise square, but I don't like the same colour meeting in adjacent rows, so I changed that. Which also means that I have to rip back the square. I'm consoling myself with the fact that some parts of it weren't perfect anyway and that it was more like a very big swatch.



Things I'm going to change are:

1.the cast on was a long tail cast on, but it bunches unattractively with the picked up stitches and separates too much from the rest of the white square, so now I use a crochet provisional cast on instead, then pick up the stitches and bind them off with the same bind off I use on the other ends (k2togs all the way)

2.the line between the white centre and first block of red is blurred unattractively on the left side where one of the white stitches goes up into the red area. The pattern I used said to simply continue knitting the white stitches, without binding off, so I did that. Not so pretty. So I'll definitely bind off there as well and pick up the stitches in red again.

3.One of the picked up stitches goes to far into the white block. I still was training how to pick up stitches along a garter stitch edge.

4.Unattractive picking up of the bind off edge. I tried picking up only one of the strands of the bound off stitches, but found that I like it much better the way I did it with the next block: picking up the whole stitch. Although that creates a slight ridge on the back, it looks much neater in the front and doesn't interrupt the pattern the way the other pick up does.

5.And finally, of course, the colour combinations, which will hopefully make this look more like a log square, rather than some random blurbs of colour. It will also make the weaving in much less of a core, because it'll reduce the number of ends to weave in from 18 to eight. Still angst inducing considering I'm planing on knitting 26 small squares, but better.

And now, off to some birthday knitting.