No, it's not a pon-"cho"

Hey everyone! I have a bit of a knitting saga to share if you're interested...

So, last March or so I ordered this yarn (in the "ginger" color) with the intention of knitting this sweater. Awesome, right? I received my yarn and began kniting. However, then we bought a house and moved and began rebuilding said house. And, as you might imagine, knitting rather fell by the wayside. Now fast forward to mid-August when I decided that I might as well continue doing my hobbies while renovating the house since it was, apparently, going to take forever. I took up the sweater where I left off and merrily continued knitting. Around this time, I also started attending a Thursday night knitting group. It turns out you pick up so many things at a knitting group! Like, did you know that you can actually try on your sweater while you're still knitting it? I had no idea! You take it off the needles and put your active stitches on a long piece of yarn instead. Then it's not constrained by the needles and you can put it on like you will be able to when it's done. Well, I thought this was genious and tried on my sweater which, remember, is basically 4 inches from being complete. You've probably figured out by now that all was not well. The bottom of the sweater fit great! Like a glove! The top part fit like I was supposed to put football pads on under it. Seriously, had it not been attached to the bottom part, I could have passed the top part of the sweater all the way over my body from head to feet without touching myself with it...it was like a knit hula hoop. There was really no way to fix it and I SWORE I had followed the pattern correctly so, angrily, I ripped it all out and re-balled up the yarn.


Thus began my quest for something else to do with my pretty cotton yarn. Of course, by now it is October so knitting with cotton is maybe not the best idea. October is wool time. Nevertheless, I was bound and determined to use this yarn for SOMETHING. So I found this pattern. Pretty! Also, the fact that it is a pon-chette (not a pon-cho, goodness no, how uncouth!) made me laugh every time I got to say it. So, I began knitting. I was putting the trauma of the football-player-shoulder sweater behind me. The healing had begun.

Until...a week after I began knitting the pon-chette I got an email from the company from which I bought the pattern.

We have become aware of some errors in our Empress Pullover pattern, item
50642. Since the errors were scattered throughout the pattern, we are sending
you a link to a brand new, corrected version of the pattern.

Ya think?! URGH. So, anyway, I finished my pon-chette and it turned out awesome!




So now I have to decide if I want to bother with the dumb sweater again. Maybe next spring....

Fun with Yarn! Thanks, Mom!

For Christmas this year, my mom gave me an umbrella swift and ball winder. What on earth are those things and why would anyone want them, you ask? Well! I have pictures to explain. *Ahem* (adjusts glasses).

Lots of yarn comes in skeins, not balls:


When you unwind that thing it looks like this:


If you try to use that to knit with, you will end up with a giant tangled mess in about three seconds flat. I know because that's what happened the first time I bought yarn in this format. It was very bad. In order to do any knitting, you first have to wind this into a ball. A really cool way to do this is to wind a center-pull ball, so that when you pull yarn out, the ball doesn't bounce around...the yarn just pulls out of the middle. One way to do this is by putting the yarn around your knees and winding it by hand. This takes about 10 minutes per skein, though, and some projects use many skeins. The top I knitted last summer, for example, used eight skeins. If what you really want to do is knit, winding balls gets boring really fast. So....you can use a ball winder and umbrella swift instead!


The umbrella swift is the big thing on the left that looks like a...well...an umbrella. That holds the yarn. The little thing on the right is the ball winder. It winds the yarn into a center-pull ball. Check it out:




Isn't that nifty? This is what you end up with:



Now I can knit with impunity! :) Thanks, Mom!