Friday, February 29, 2008

Behold! Imperfection!

My new glove-to-be. Pretty!
Oh. A bit off. See where the cable ends? On the middle finger, which while it's certainly the middle of the five digits of the hand, is absolutely not the middle of the four fingers, that spot being reserved for the gap between middle and ring fingers. Where the cable does NOT end.
The pattern which I used as a starting point had you add thumb gusset shaping on either side of the stitch one away from the start (or end, depending on which hand we're talking about) of the round, and then to use as the thumb those increased stitches as well as the stitches on either side - meaning the stitch at the beginning or end of the round. This means that the back/front separation point is the beginning of the round, right?

Today as I went on my lovely walk (I might as well be back in San Francisco as the weather is delicious) I examined my older and just about superfluous gloves, only to see that the centre of the thumb gusset points to the centre of the underside of the index finger, with the back/front separation occurring three or four stitches from the thumb gusset. Which helps to explain why the cable that's supposed to mark the centre back of the hand doesn't, instead being skewed towards the thumb.

It's not as though I've never ripped back before (see any previous post mentioning knitting), or even that this is a huge time investment but dammit! I can make gloves in my sleep! Crooked ones, apparently.

All is not lost though, as I did finish this:
The rope has freshwater pearls, garnet and green aventurine beads as well as silvery seed beads, and the pendant is ruby in zoisite set in sterling silver with a pearl and a faceted garnet. There was no ripping and redoing; this one went exactly as planned. I like that, for a change.

Nancy has a jacket I admired, which she'd made of wool fabric that she'd fulled in the machine. This made for a wonderfully stable and surprisingly drapey fabric requiring no edge finishing (though Adriana really didn't approve), and made me think about my fabric stash, and whether there was anything in it with which I could copy her. The thing with my fabric stash is that I stopped sewing quite a while before I figured out that I didn't like making all my own clothes that much, but had continued to augment the stash at a pretty constant rate anyway, so it's bigger than it ought to be for a person who really doesn't sew all that often.

What possessed me, in the nineties, to buy yards and yards of a screamingly eighties-coloured plaid (of all things) wool twill, I'll never know, but it'll be perfect for my experiment. It's in the washing machine right now (I hear the sweet gurgle of rinse-water draining) and if it is respectable (in all but colour) after its turn in the dryer, I'll consider the dyepot. I'm thinking it could be much improved by being overdyed with burnt orange.

1 comment:

fibergal said...

I had a serious swoon when I saw that necklace. You should post warnings of outrageous beauty ahead for posts like these. It is uncanny how it all fit together. Exemplary.