A rocky beginning

At the moment I’m finding myself in a very rare situation where I really love all the WIPs that I’m working on right now, and I want to work on all of them all the time! Hmm, odd, huh? If only I had the time to knit all the time… So I’ve been trying to rotate my WIPs so that I get to work on a bit of each of them. But even so, I think Serrano is my favourite at the moment. When I’m working on it, I find it really hard to put it down.

I debated with myself whether I should do a swatch first or not. Thoughts running through my head like this: “I want to start RIGHT NOW!” “But what if your gauge is way off? It could be too baggy, or doesn’t fit at all!” “But, but, it’s lace. I’ll have to block it anyway, I can block it to measurements…” “Still, what if it’s all wrong, you’ll have to frog like 200 stitches!!”

And then, light bulb moment! I’ll start with the sleeve! And since Serrano has a split cuff, each half knitted separately before being joined, it’s only half a cuff to start with. I can call that a swatch!!

And so I did, and good thing I did that, too, because it turned out that I made horrible mistakes in the process of making that “swatch”. First was because I didn’t pay attention to the pattern instruction that says “When there are not enough stitches to complete both a yo and its paired decrease, work these stitches in stockinette stitch.” and did the yarn-over anyway, only to discover 12 rows later, that I had 6 stitches too many. Frog, frog. Then not long after I had to frog again, this time because I decided to compare my little swatch to the pattern designer’s stitch pattern close up on the website, and discovered this:

See how in my swatch on the left, the pattern repeats are further apart from each other, compared to how it’s meant to be? Well, turned out that I misread the chart. You see, in the chart, the pattern repeat is 7 stitches, plus 4 stitches extra. The 7 stitches repeat is outlined in red. But as it happened, I printed out the pattern with my black and white printer, and didn’t see the red outline. So I happily knitted and knitted, thinking that the pattern repeat is 11 stitches wide, and the result is what you saw above. Sigh.

Thankfully after that it was quite smooth sailing, and I think my gauge is ok too. Here’s what the sleeve looks like now. This is not stretched out to full capacity yet, only stretched a bit so that you can see the lace pattern.