When It Doesn't Look Like the Picture

Hello all!  Knitting here!  I’m filling in for Pam on this blog post today.  She has gotten herself into such a tizzy that she is almost unable to function.  Well, maybe it’s not quite to that extent, but she is in a bad way. 

What, you may be wondering could have brought her to her knees weeping (at least in the knitting world)?  

A chart.

You see, it all started when LYS Red Bug Yarn and Gifts had a deal with a free pattern when you purchase Berrocco’s Modern Cotton, and naturally she wanted to support Red Bug (especially during this shutdown), so she ordered Modern Cotton, but instead of using the free pattern they gave her, she found a beautiful shawl pattern on Berroco’s website and she fell in love with it. Do you ever do that?  Find a pattern and decide that you must make it?  Anyway, the chart seemed straight forward enough with only a few symbols, so she thought, “How hard can it be?”  She has a great stitch counter and a nice line board to keep her place, and she felt confident that she and I together could do it.

Well, her package came from Red Bug and she opened it excitedly, 

Nice!  Just one call and she got it all.

printed out the free pattern from the Berroco website..... and immediately had to watch a Youtube video to make the garter stitch tab that began the shawl. 

Then, after knitting the tab about 3 times, she liked it well enough and started knitting the chart.  And then she started tearing out stitches and knitting it again.  Then the piece started forming a ‘cup’ so she tugged on it to straighten it out.  The it began to curl.  Then she started it all over.  Then the yarn had been knitted so many times that it began to fray, so she cut the knitted piece off and started again. By this time Pam and I weren’t having fun.

The next day was a beautiful sunny Saturday and she spent almost the entire day knitting on that shawl, puzzling out the chart, thinking of how she could make it work, knitting all along, and finally – finally – knitted to the last round before the repeat.  And there she still is.

She emailed Susan at Red Bug Yarn and Gifts and Susan gave her some advice, but by the time she started knitting again that little spark of understanding had gone out. She had emailed Berroco’s pattern support the night before and they very promptly answered, and again, it made sense in the email, but not when she started knitting.  Later that day she found the pattern and several who had successfully knitted it on ravelry.com.  She emailed two of them, one of them answered, and again, no joy.

Because this is becoming quite a long and dreary post, let me just say that she thought of giving up and letting it go, but that girl is like a dog with a bone and she is simply not giving up.  She joined Team Tear Out and thought she might make something else with the Modern Cotton yarn, but no.  Tonight she has started again and she has a brand new plan. 

I’ll let you know how it goes.