Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Measure Twice, Knit Once

I worked on a hat with the recently dyed Adams Farm merino. It's really a dream to knit with - so soft and fluffy! Some gauge weirdness happened (surprise surprise). I started at the top of the hat on two circulars and was getting a gauge of 4.5 st/in, so I decided to increase until I had 100 sts, to yield a 22" hat to snugly fit my 24" in head (no that's not a typo). When I got to 100 stitches, I moved all the stitches onto a single circular. At this point, you say "Ah-ah! That's a problem!" But I didn't know that... so then I knit around and around and around in blissful ignorance. BTW, this is perfect knitting when you're trying to pry ice cream-fueled seven year-old twins from the love tester machine at Arundel Mills Mall.

When we got home and everyone collapsed, I had some proper sit-down-and-concentrate-on-knitting time and I had a good look at my progress. "Hmmm," I thought, "This looks a little big...." So I got out the ruler and sure enough, it was 4 st/in. This makes it a 25" hat:
Oh bother. Time to rip:
Not all the way, though. Just to a little before the increases stopped. I'm now working over 92 stitches, and for added insurance, I'm using a 3x1 rib for the body. The moral of this story is that I knit bigger using a single circular than with two circulars, even on the exact same needles.

In the end, I should have a maybe 120 yards left. I'm going to try Fetching with the leftovers.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ooohhhh that really turned out beautiful. WTG.

Secret Pal

Nic said...

Fetching... your hands are just going to curl up and go to sleep inside of that yarn.