Well, I wish I had had more time to knit last week.  Swamped as I was with a special crisis assignment, many things fell (again) by the wayside.  Knitting was one of them.

Still in what little time I had I did find out that I had comitted two of knitting’s cardinal sins:

1. I didn’t take enough time to gauge properly, relying instead on the hubris of previous experience, and some inconsistent partial counts.
2. When I cast on and then joined my piece together to knit in the round, I introduced a half twist.

So what I ended up with was a piece that was both way too big and being twisted – unusuable.  So I ripped back.  It just goes to show that no matter how many times you do something, and how well you think you know it, every new venture is another opportunity to make the same old misakes.

In the mean time, here’s a photo of the yet-again cast on and two rows knit new start. 

Yes I know it’s blurry, but you can begin to see the colors build.  As I suspected, the larger teal areas are lining up nicely, with the browns and greens somewhat less regimented between them.  A better photo of a bigger slice tomorrow.  Unless of course I’ve managed to twist the miserable thing again and will need to begin all over.

Traffic here

Looking over the logs for last week I was amazed to see the traffic here spike up to almost three times the expected number of visitors.  There don’t appear to be many new referral entries, nor can I think of any ready explanation aside from a growing fascination with the Kureopatora Snake scarf pattern.  A couple of scarf exchanges seem to have picked it up as an item of interest.  My own experimentation and that of the other knitters suggest that there are lots of yarns that work well with the basic idea – the main difference among them being to vary the number of stitches across, depending on the chosen yarn’s gauge and repeat length.  You can make the thing out of any yarn from fingering/sock self-stripers all the way up to bulky weights (superbulkies might be a bit too thick for comfortable wear as a scarf, but that’s a matter of personal preference – not a limitation of the pattern itself.)  Of course, it’s obvious that yarns heavier than DK will require fewer stitches, and lighter ones will need more.  For me in this pattern, I get the best results using an even number of stitches, but that’s a mnemonic, not a hard and fast rule.  If you can keep the K1, P1 rib working off an odd number stitch base, go ahead and use it.

My snake is fun in any yarn, even a solid color, but it become ssomething special in a long-repeat varieggated.  My hard-to-find, discontinued Kureopatora DK weight works for the pattern, as do other long-repeat Noro yarns like Silk Garden, and Kureyon.  I’d recommend reducing the number of stitches across in both.  I find that for them, the 30 stitches I used for Kureopatora is too many.  For example, my Kureyon scarves, were done on 26 stitches across.  I’ve also heard that Daikeito Diamusee also would be a good candidate, although there don’t seem to be any local distributors of the stuff and I haven’t seen it myself.  Other possibilities include Regia 6 Ply Crazy Colors, Lana Grossa Dasolo Stripes, Katia Mexico,  Euro Mexican Wave, some of the long repeat as opposed to tweedy colors of Encore Colorspun in any of its weights (an economical choice); or for those with bigger budgets than I – Classic Elite Embrace.  I am sure there are more.