Monday, April 14, 2003

Blog Rules

I am most glad to see the intelligent opinions about the last blog post.  I appreciate that not everyone likes the rules, or my comments.  One clarification I would like to make thanks to Ginny and Kirsten's comments.  My opening statement in the last post:

"Blogging, or Knit Blogging in particular, is getting WAY too popular"

was not meant to stifle new blogs, or insult them in any way.  I was more talking about the popularity of blog readership and forums being built up around the comments and tagboard softwares.  As I noted in my comments, there are many new and vibrant knitting blogs being started daily, and I try to check out as many as I can.

Back to Knitting
Now that I've done my best to set expectations for the folks engaged in this forum, I can feel free to talk about the main subject at hand...knitting.

Progress
Thanks to Kathy's urgings, I did some more work on the Double Ruffle Scarf, but I'm having a problem with it and I don't know if its because

1. I'm using different yarn (Kathy uses Koigu and I'm using the Joslyn's yarn)
2. I made a mistake in how I'm crocheting
3. Its' not really a problem...it alwasy looks this way at this stage of the scarf

The scarf is very simple. It starts with a few hundred chain stitches and then a double crochet into each chain up one side of the chain, and another double crochet into each chain down the other side of the chain. Then the next round has me doing 3 double crochets into each double crochet on the first round (again, up one side and then down the other side). The tripling of stitches causes the ruffle on each side. Finally, the pattern calls for two more rounds of double crochets into each double crochet on the previous round.

I'm currently on the round where I'm doing 3 double crochets into each double crochet on the previous round. I finished one side of the scarf, and I'm about 1/5th down the other side.

If you're following so far, here's my problem. The two sides of the scarf are folding together at the  middle instead of splaying outward like I thought they would, and the ruffle from each side is "spooning" into the ruffle on the other side. The following picture kind of shows it, but the color of the yarn and the design of the scarf make for a very difficult picture-taking task.



I'm hoping that when I start the 3rd round this problem will go away, or a little blocking will stop the scarf from folding in half. Otherwise, this whole freaking thing will be frogged and I'll start again with Koigu as I probably should have from the beginning.

Knitting Designs
In addition to the Chock-a-Block sweater that I should finish shortly, there is the Mini-Chock-a-Block sweater that we're choosing colors for. I've also got another similiar idea in my mind using diamonds instead of squares, but I'm not sure if these sweaters will all turn out too similarly. I'm also thinking about doing a man's hooded sweatshirt-like design, but that's only in my head. Finally, I've got Marianne Isager on the brain, and I want to do some extraordinary man's sweater with her designs as inspiration.

With a couple of other guys who are working on various types of designs, a men-on-men sweater design book might actually be feasible. We shall see.

Knitting Progress
In addition to the work on the scarf, I've done a little work on the second sleeve. As boring as it is (since it looks just like the other sleeve) I include a picture.


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