Damn, Knit & Blast It

It’s been a bad knitting week

Do I mean a bad week to find time for knitting or that I’ve knit really badly? Unfortunately…Both!

We have spent the last few weekends decorating our office at home. It really needed doing – we spend a great deal of time in there and it was frankly, depressingly shabby, dull and grim… It was a slog but worth the effort.

Unfortunately, in the little time I had left to knit, I was very tired…can you guess what happens when a very tired knitter tackles fairisle???

Huh? Can ya?

Yup – I screwed up

So. The body of Liliana is done, just the “easy” sleeves to knock out. They are plain red stocking stitch with a 5 row band of fairisle at the wrist – like this…

From Lilianna

Really not hard.

After whipping through the body, what could possible go wrong? I was looking forward to an “easy sleeve”…

I whizzed past the patten and halfway up the sleeve when I realised, those rows of plain black are one row each…for some unfathomable reason I had done two rows of black for each stripe. I consulted with the Guilty Knitters,

“It’s fine, just do the other sleeve to match….” I was persuaded. (Quite easily actually!)

Then I noticed – I had dropped a stitch in the fairisle section – two errors were more than I could accept so I ripped back and lost an entire morning’s knitting (I hate ripping back and wasting good knitting time!)

In the process, I managed disembowel my formerly centre pull ball of Kidsilk Aura and create this delicate mess that threatens to tangle every time I look at it.

From Lilianna

I started again  on the sleeve that evening….while tired…

I got this far…

From Lilianna

…and couldn’t work out why the pattern on the fairisle looked wrong, I had one less stitch than I thought I should have and there were a couple of odd looking stitches in the fairisle I couldn’t “wiggle” into place….

I had dropped a stitch in the same place…AGAIN!

From Lilianna

I’m ashamed to say, I had a serious knitterly tantrum.

I flung the erroneous sleeve across the room and haven’t looked at it for a week   It has been a very long time since I’ve physically flung knitting

I usually restrict myself to some heartfelt swearing…

We’ve finished the office now. It’s a clean, fresh, duckegg blue and very tidy. I’m glad we did it – exhausting as it was.  I’ve even managed to reuse the curtains I blogged about making (with Mewsley’s help) a few years ago – Gasp! In 2007!!!

I have tidy cupboards, made from cannibalising an old cupboard, reconfiguring it and adding some new parts and doors…

From Lilianna

Room for me and the lovely Ben to work at home (in front of the lovely curtains!)…

From Lilianna

And most importantly, Thug’s basket is back in his favourite spot, under the desks, by the radiator

From Lilianna

Now that’s the office is finished- time to rip back that sleeve …again.