Prairie cabling error found at 11pm

I actually got to sit down in my own home on my own couch to watch TV and knit after eating a home-cooked supper last night. Wonders will never cease. I worked on Prairie and got to the point where you're to divide the fronts for the straps (it's a tank) and got distracted watching Leno's last night on the Tonite Show. When Conan O'Bryan made his appearance and I lost all interest, I started looking at Prairie to place stitch markers where the front neckline dividing decreases will be and found an error. A glaring error:

Did you see it? Look closer:

Yep, here it is in all it's uncrossed glory, a cable crossing left instead of right:

This will cost me 8 rows of ripping back and while keeping track of where I'm at in the armhole decreases. Grrr!

SSK is an ugly stitch

Well, the newness of Facebook is starting to wear off and I'm now returning attention to my other online interests.

I'm still working with Jo Ellyn Wheeler and Carolyn Faircloth on the TKGA Master course. Today we worked on the three swatches concerning decreasing. And I learned something that amazed me. I mean, really. I just sat there staring at it. I knit almost exclusively sweaters, which require shaping, a lot of it. I had vaguely heard of the term 'full-fashioned' but had yet to knit a pattern requiring it. Usually, your right-hand side of the garment decrease is an SSK (slip knit-wise, slip-knitwise, return both to left needle and knit the 2 together through the back loops), and the left-hand side is K2tog. These two are supposed to mirror each other but seldom do. Enter full-fashioned. This is the opposite, i.e. K2tog is on the right-hand side, SSK on the left. The regular way produces a vertical line up the side of the garment. Full-fashioned produces a series of 'slashes' pointing outwards at each decrease. Okay, to each his own.

Here's the part that amazed me. K2tog on the right-hand side MIRRORS K2tog on the left. I am NOT KIDDING. As soon as I take pics of my swatches, I'll point it out. Try it and see, I'll never do that ugly SSK again!

Also OTN, Prairie from Anny Blatt Timeless Classics from the Knit Collection.

Vacation Knitting

Well, the husband and I are driving to Dallas tonight to catch a plane tomorrow morning for 5 kid-free days in Jamaica! Woo hoo! Naturally, I have a cold. But the most important packing consideration for the trip is, of course, what knitting project or projects to take. I'm still in stash-busting mode, so I'm going to take that cheap, er inexpensive, acqua Sinfonia yarn and make a (silk purse out of a sow's ear) tank out of it, working in pieces.

Digression: everytime I get seduced to the dark side of knitting from the top down, I am reminded why I don't like that method. Sure the collar and yoke are fun, and it's exciting dividing for the arms and body. But after that the thrill is gone and you're left slogging through miles of knitting and having to constantly rearrange a huge mass of knitting in your lap. No fun and not very portable. And the stitches at the underarms stretch out forcing you to pick up more stitches than called for on the sleeves to hide the holes and then figure out how to decrease them away. End of rant.

So, back to the tank. I am knitting Prairie out of Anny Blatt Timeless Classics from the Knit Collection (I added the pattern to Ravelry, but there's no picture, since I'm not sure of the copyright violation of scanning in the picture published with it, although I've seen others on Ravelry do it). I bought this book when I first started knitting, but was so intimidated by it that it's sat on the shelf ever since. Anny, you're going down. I will conquer a pattern from you or die trying. Okay, not DIE, but the desperation of forcing two sticks and string into something beautiful sometimes approaches that emotion.

And what of the Master Level Handknitting course, have I flaked out on that as well? No, sir, I have finished swatches 4-6 and when I laid them out side by side, noticed swatch 5 was much shorter than the other two, due to the fact that I missed an increase. I'll have to completely redo it, so it's going into Time Out until I get back.