Did you happen to catch a glimpse of my humble abode on Apartment Therapy's House Call on Saturday? If you were busy making the most of your weekend, go check it out now! With colder weather peeking in lately, my knitting needles have come out once again. For some reason I only knit on airplanes or in cold weather. Well, after making hats for all my boys last Christmas (Hubby, Handy Dad, my nephew Eli, and his daddy Eric), I needed to spread the knitting love and make a hat to keep my cheeky new niece warm this winter. I fell in love with this pattern on Ravelry.com and jumped in needles first, hoping that my hat ended up half as cute as the one on the pattern's adorable little model here.
The knitting gods have other plans, I guess.
I SWEAR I followed this pattern to the T. Clearly I'm not quitting my day job. I was debating whether to share with you my knitting debacles, but I clearly decided to. Often times DIY blogs are all styled, amazing projects and rooms and rarely do you see the dozens of false starts it took to achieve the perfect end results that you avidly pin. Keepin' it real here as always.
My first, half completed attempt was scrapped mid-way because I thought the proportions looked off. After assuring myself that the pattern had good reviews and that I should see it to the end, I gave it another go. Aside from using a smaller needle to make the hat smaller than my first attempt(and apparently too small) this just ended up looking ridiculous. Sometimes I will, admittedly, follow a pattern blindly, even if it doesn't looking right yet, because sometimes the textile reveals itself as you get in further. This was not the case. The only thing that revealed itself as I went further was a conehead and my dear Lyla did not deserve that.
I have started more than a half dozen hats in the past few weeks(this pattern and one other), the majority of which have found themselves in the trash, and my baby niece is still hatless.
The most common issue I've had has been knitter error. Since I'm a weeee bit OCD here, if I can't easily rewind to undo my stitch errors, I scrap it and start over. Several times. I stopped counting. I'm also blaming the patterns for my inability to follow them properly. Don't they know they need to SIMPLIFY so I can follow??
After my epic conehead failure, however, I think I know how to modify the pattern to actually be able to knit the desired result- Less repeats and decreasing more gradually.
No more blindly following the pattern.... I WILL make this one work! (or give myself blisters trying)
Did you have any DIY misfires or successes this weekend?