The amazing LIFELINE! (lengthy saga)

General Knitting
1

You all have heard about the afghan from hell…if not a brief recap for your reading displeasure: (this all takes place over several weeks)

I cast on…my long tail is too short by 8 inches…I do it again…ditto…finally I leave that sucker halfway across the room and it workse.

I knit 8 inches. The #($*%& falls off the needles irrevocably.

I cast on. I lose count 3/4 of the way due to paying very close attention to Carrie and Mr. Big. (ummmmmmmmmm Mr. Big, yummy).

I recast on. Life is grand. I knit another 8 inches or so. I go outside to knit, and I notice A), that this afghan is, very well, CHUNKY and B), the color that is supposed to blend with my lovely brown and beige is not rusty in tone but PURPLE in the light.

I frog. The frog turns into a huge snarl. Thank the Lord this yarn is cheap because I dont have hte patience for this sh%^ and into the trash that heap goes.

I cast on. Without that purple crap. It only two tries, but yes once again I lose fricking count.

Another 5 inches…and I DROP a FREAKIN PURL STITCH! Due to the double strand knottiness of my yarns, and the fact that I can’t fix a dropped purl stitch for beans, yes you guess it the entire thing implodes as I try to fix it! FROGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

So I cast on…YET AGAIN…when I get to my first row where count matters, I note merrily that I have added 4 stitches to an 8 stitch pattern…since you are already 4 rows in at that point, I decide its a design feature and not a flaw…and continue merrily on my way.

So last night I am surfing this site, and I see somebody’s lovely orangey tank (the shapely tank it was) with a big honker lifeline across the ta-ta area…and I swear the lightbulb flashed on and off and on and off!!! I had NEVER thought about using a lifeline BEFORE tragedy struck, and I found it difficult to understand in SNB how she wove one in and picked up the right stitches, especially with these two gnarly yarns i am using…I watched Amy’s video…and was even more WOWZA…I scuttled downstairs as fast as I could and spent 2 minutes putting a lovely cheap blue worsted across the most recent row…

While this most likely means I will never drop a remaining stitch in this nightmare afghan…I am just so pleased that I CAN drop a stitch and who will care anyway if I do! WEEEEE!!! I LOVE THIS SITE!!!

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I SERIOUSLY hope your afghan karma improves now!

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[color=violet]Maggie nods in understanding and agreement … [/color]

Way to persevere. :thumbsup:

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Use two balls to cast on and you’ll never run short again!

5

Kitkat, I can’t fix a purl stitch either. But I just turn my work around and it then becomes a knit stitch that I can fix very easily. Then when fixed, turn back around to continue on your way.

6

If you use a crochet hook from behind to fix a purl, that works.

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A knitter after my own heart! I too would have tried and retried until I got it right. I love that you didn’t give up. Way to go!! :thumbsup:

Here’s a tip for your long tail cast on. Before starting, wrap the yarn around your needle as many times as there are stitches to cast on. That will give you the perfect length to start your long tail cast on.

Even quicker, take the width measurement for the finished item and multiply that by 3. Measure your yarn to that length, make your slip knot, and start casting on. :wink:

8

Oh good idea re estimating cast on!

The issue wasnt so much fixing the purl part (cuz I too turn it so that it becomes a knit), and it wasnt using a crochet hook, because I have successfully recovered from disaster before…the issue was the two yarns…I couldnt seem to get the right ones…

Oh well, it wont happen again now that I have amy LIFELINE up! I plan on doing it every ten inches or so…

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I don’t get it. What’s a lifeline?

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From what I understand, its something that’s usually used in lace work. Basically you weave a contrasting yarn through your work at a point where you know everything before that point is correct. Then, if you make a mistake, you only have to frog down to that line.

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Kitkat - see Amy’s post re the lifeline and interchangeables.

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OR, see Amy’s VIDEO on how to insert one.

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Bless you! I would have burned that yarn as a sacrifice to the knitting gods long ago. You have amazing stick-to-it-iveness!

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Thats what I did, watch Amy’s video, and I realized that a lifeline would save me in this case too…since for some reason its very hard to fix mistakes with the bernat boucle (it just is very chunky and knobby)…that why couldnt I use a lifeline to prevent horrors from happening with this? The actual insertion of said lifeline, even with 100+stitches cast on, literally took a few minutes, and it could save me hours of work when I dropped that stitch.

My karma on this has CLEARLY changed! HA! (and yes i strongly considered throwing this project into the trash but darn it it is EASY!)

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I’m all for perseverance, but I think I would’ve decided that I wasn’t meant to make THAT afghan after about the 5th or so problem :slight_smile: like bad karma or something.

You go girl! Just don’t forget to do another lifeline after a few inches :thumbsup:

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I think that was my shapely tank you were talking about - I LOVE lifelines. I haven’t actually had to unravel back to one yet, but I have frogged a few too many times to want to do THAT again!! Lifelines rock!!

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knitqueen, it WAS your shapely tank…thank you for sharing your picture, it would never have crossed my mind to insert the lifeline BEFORE the problem occurred!

BTW, I am signed up to do a sweater class at my LYS, you get to pick your own pattern, but I bet they wont let me do the shapely tank even though I would love to…they want you to buy stuff there, and I guess that makes sense…shapely tank is definitely on the radar though, and yours looks fabulous!

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As far as the shapely tank, a word of advice…if you are not a full-figured woman, I would suggest NOT doing the short row shaping at the waist line. I did do it because I was excited to try short show shaping, but I am a fairly small person and that extra shaping at the waist just doesn’t work. It makes it all bunchy and I’m disappointed in that part.

19

laugh
This sounds like my current raglan baby sweather saga!
I am now on my 14th sweater, the others are either frogged or in the trash for one reason or another ranging from droppest stitchs that split and kept pulling out other stitchs so badly I tossed it to ALMOST done and finished and then realized when all sewed up that I had gotten too excited after 5-10 starts/stops and thinking I was done that i hadn’t put the k1p1 cuff on sleeve 2 .
Now a large part of this was errors in the pattern , and me being a new knitter didn’t ‘see" them and blamed them on ‘must be me’ for several attempts until emailing the author and finding out ‘Oh i made this change and never changed those numbers"…
The math still isn’t correct I think, but really haven’t gotten far enough to check and recheck lol and I’ve even used a life line several times and never fails, It get’s split into the yarn or I get it in wrong.
But I’ve done this pattern enough times now I get the general “drift”. Although I still don’t understand why casting on 4 on the front of sweater and casting on the back section of sweater is going to "Balance the sleeve’ on both sides. I tried repeatedly and under each sleeve looks different on each sleeve shrug Might be the way I turn and cast on…
But i found a different way to do this that makes sense in another pattern so im "improvising’… Oh dear I’m rambling… Point being this attempted baby sweater has become quite a family joke :wink: BUT I will not be BEATEN!

crosses fingers We’ll see how this attempt goes :slight_smile:

Oh the pattern is:

20

Thanks for the shapely tips…i am perhaps a bit more shapely than I would like to be right now :shock: so will have to think about whether I want to short row it or not.

With respect to the baby pattern, it does look adorable and it doesnt LOOK like it should be that difficult LOL, but sometimes I think we just are not meant to have an easy go of it, ya know??? I figure every bit I knit I am at least LEARNING!!!