Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Time to pick up

It's Tuesday, and my octopus only has seven legs.

This non-sequitur is brought to you by my latest knitting project. In knitting, the first row of stitches made is called the "cast on" row. That language puts me in the mind of fishing, and it's not a bad comparison, hopefully throwing your line into the water to see what you catch. I've only really managed one of the many methods of casting on, but it serves me well. My problem now with the octopus is that I need to go back and revisit that first row to attach legs, so the end product will look like a something, and not like a blob.

My knitting -- like my writing -- tends to shape up after a few rows (lines), so my cast-on row is numerically correct with the proper number of stitches, but may have serious style problems. Typically the tension in the yarn is wrong, and picking over it uncovers all the weak spots and funny gaps that even out over the course of the project. Now with this pattern, I have to go back and "pick up" stitches, which means just what it sounds like. Stitches that are done and in the past, stuff I laid down at the start of the project now suddenly fund themselves back on the needle and under scrutiny, being asked to support something else. And somehow, despite my ability to count to numbers higher than ten, I seem to be running out of room to attach the legs on the octopus. I just started leg number six last night, and without some creative rejiggering, it looks like I might be making a septopus after all. I'll figure this out, though. Knitting can be surprisingly tolerant of failure, especially when you're just doing it for fun. I'll work around it and it'll come out OK.

Now, it's Tuesday night -- the night of my wife's knitting class, coincidentally -- which leaves me and the offspring alone tonight. Once they're abed this evening, I will have about ninety minutes of quiet-in-the-house time. Unlike last week when I squandered this by actively ignoring the NaNo draft sitting right there on the side table, I think I'll dig out the pen and the note cards and start dealing with all those early lines, those cast-on pages that laid the foundation for the final story. Lines and pages that need reworking and revisiting, to ease out the tension and straighten things up. (Or maybe just ripping them out altogether.)

It's time to pick up and get to work.

7 comments:

Strikethru said...

I am sorry, but you completely rule for trying to knit that. I knit (badly), and I know that at no time now or in the future will I be able to create anything other than a square.

mpclemens said...

I only wish my example would come out as neatly as the pictured one. I'm using a completely different yarn which makes it hard to pull stitches as tight as they would need to be to get that cool curling-leg effect. It it works out, I may adapt the pattern. I'm thinking a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea-type squid. How awesome would that be?

Also, it sounds way more fun than actual editing.

Monda said...

Oh boy. You just gave me my Spring Break Knitting Project. I LOVE that octopus!

Damn the math and full-needles ahead, I say.

Teri said...

I've been knitting since I was sixteen and you might say I'm experienced ;) Feel free to shoot me any questions. It looks like the arms are what we call "i-cord" (short for idiot-cord). Hard to tell from looking at the picture. I usually tension yarn by wrapping it once around my little finger. It's all just a question of practice and letting your hands learn how to do the work for you.

mpclemens said...

That photo doesn't rally show the proper scale of this thing, it's actually quite large. The body would easily serve as a goofy-shaped baby hat. A reworked version of this project with different yarn would make an *awesome* toddler rasta hat. Something to consider...

The legs are almost i-cord, but are knit in the round starting with 13 sts and reducing every 6th row until 4 remain, which is 60 rows (unless you goof and only get 56, which I've done for a leg or two.) The legs themselves are going well -- except for the one I had to rip out, of course -- but where I ran into trouble is attaching them. You're supposed to pick up either 7 or 8 stitches from along the body depending on which leg you're making, and I've run out of space to do this properly, so I'm just squeezing the remaining legs in there and not worrying about it too much.

Monda said...

My octopus is definitely becoming something funky. It would help if I treated the pattern as a pattern instead of as a *suggestion*.

mpclemens said...

Treating the pattern as literal marching orders is what got me into trouble in the first place. That, and some questionable yarn decisions.

I'm almost to the last leg, then it gets stuffed and closed up on the bottom. Awkward photos of the end result to follow.