I then had to make a decision: four separate balls of wool or winding the two balls on? Thinking it would be a darn sight simpler to wind-on, I went for that option. That produced an initially very long-winded process of twisted the yarn together behind every stitch, but eventually I got into a pretty good rhythm, and I was even unphased by the interesting pattern it made on the front... All seemed to be going well until I looked a little more closely... the problem with the 'weaving' effect this was creating on the wrong side of the knit was that it was totally restricting any natural give the jumper might otherwise have had. Which meant I began with a large, loose jumper, and ended with something a doll would struggle to get into!!
My attempts to salvage the situation while watching Comic Relief came to nothing when I eventually tried the top piece on - no matter how much I might be able to add to the edges to expand them, the neckline still looked ridiculously shrunken. So, with heavy heart, I will need to unpick the lot and start again. I'm thinking this time I'll just choose to be a little less clever and go all purple. I can then always use the remaining fake Noro for a hat, scarf, gloves... anything else, really... It's not the first project I've ever knitted that I've realised after completing will need unpicking and starting over (I still haven't returned to the tunic!). But at least this time I only have to unpick the top half...
The second disaster was an eBay purchase. I decided to invest in some wool for a scarf knitting project I'm working on (I've been using the iPad to help me design... ;)), and purchased £40-worth from a retailer I have used before. This involved a trek up to the Postal Sorting Office to collect a parcel, which at the time, I had commented to the Postie who served me, seemed smaller than I'd imagined it would be... When I opened it, I discovered why: I'd been sent completely the wrong collection of wool. Funnily enough it didn't even cross my mind to send it back - you don't think about these things with eBay. So instead of my box of £40 worth of 3ply and 4ply gnarly colours, I received this:
On the plus side, these are silk threads, worth £10 more than I paid for them (I can only assume someone, somewhere, has a box of gnarly 3ply they really don't want and spent £10 more for...). The downside is they're thin enough to be sewing cotton! I've tried knitting with them, on small and large needles, and it's hopeless. I tried using one cone on the knitting machine and, although things started well, as soon as I pulled the nylon casting-on cord away, the yarn is so so thin it just fell off the needles! I then tried combining eight of the yarns together to make an equivalent of about 1ply - 2 ply at a very big push - and it just ended up getting messy and tangled.
So I had a box full of beautiful silk thread and nothing to do with it! And then, for some reason, I suddenly remembered the bag of scrap balls of wool my mother had given me, in the bottom of which were some old pieces of junk from my old bedroom which had been abandoned when I moved out, and in amongst that junk: a Rocco Flower loom, still with its pegs intact! I decided this would be my last hope - if this didn't work, then I had 20 reels of silk thread to sell off. And things started tough when I realised I couldn't remember exactly how to use the flower loom and couldn't find the old instruction book! Thank goodness we live in a day and age where people seem to want to make videos of themselves doing absolutely anything and everything! It was still tricky trying to get such thin thread to do as it was told, and involved considerably more twists and turns than usual, but it finally looks as though I can use up some of the thread.
Perhaps this will be the good thing that comes from disaster? Coupled with the fact that, based on my previous note that people make videos of everything, I found there is an entire course on how to use a manual knitting machine on YouTube, and even though it's not strictly about my machine, the lesson I've watched so far has already shown me where I've been going wrong and giving up prematurely. It turns out that box of weird looking tools was actually a box of essential tools! So I've decided to work through the lessons and see if I can stop blaming the knitting machine for going wrong and actually make it work! Exciting...!! (I'm giving myself a week before I give up again...)
Things that are going well - or, rather, are still going anyway: Snowflake grew a few inches this weekend. The burgundy Vixen Camisole I mentioned last post hasn't moved much past where it was then:
It's meant to turn into this:
I'm nervous about the stitch-dropping bit, but at this rate I'll have plenty of time to build up my nerves for it...
I've ordered a lot more new wool, from a different shop on eBay and one I am hopeful will make a more accurate delivery, and then it's on with my scarfing plans. If I could only make friends with the knitting machine, I could turn the ideas into an industry...
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