Thursday July 16: the day it finally happened. The day I finally finished....the behemoth knit!Actually, it's called "The Chase Is On!" and it's up for sale here on Ravelry in all it's 23" by 66" glory. But not without a fight!
It began innocently enough. Back in mid-February, the boss chose Estelle Yarns Eco Andean DK Wool as the annual Yarn Challenge yarn. It was terribly fitting, since it is the Year of the Sheep after all. I got unreasonably excited because I had promised myself a 3-colour wrap design using the three colours that were chosen for the Challenge. I had fallen madly in love with this yarn ever since Estelle added it to their house brand stable last year and I got to design the Eco Andean DK Brocade Wrap for the free pattern leaflet series. Fate, right?
I was realistic about how long it would take. I admitted that there was no way that it would be done in time for the judging, but no matter anyway as I was ineligible to win on account of the fact I'm an employee and all. Come judging week, however, the WIP made guest appearances in the shop window, travelling back and forth in my project bag for a 10-row repeat here and there.
Fast forward to the beginning of June. Throw in a lot of soccer for my son, a smattering of new designs for the Fall 2015 Estelle Yarns collection and the mundane routines of life and lo and behold, the behemoth knit is almost done.
Just one problem though. I was running out of the dark grey yarn. I did the math, I swear. When I launched into this epic journey I swatched and measured and weighed and measured and weighed again. I told myself that since it was the darker colour, maybe the yardage was short on it because it weighed more - usually true for dyed yarns, but this is a natural colour. Without a solid explanation, I begrudgingly decided to frog back the cast on edge "robbing Peter to pay Paul" as I put it on Facebook in one of my regular behemoth knit updates (actually, you can scroll through many of them here, if you are so inclined). This was a huge pain in the bum because a) ripping out the single moss that provided me with my lovely non-rolling edges is a stitch by stitch proposition and b) I had to frog in multiples of ten rows, but always ending up with an even number of stitches for each colour or the mid-row joins happening in the moss stitch beginning and end sections wouldn't allow for tidy wraps where the colours change. So it wasn't enough to just rip back 10 rows at a time, it had to be 20! You'd think I'd hate moss stitch by now, but you'd be wrong. Then catastrophe number two: I started running out of the white yarn. This was many more times worse than the dark grey yarn scenario. At least if I pulled out a section of it I had lots of yarn to work with because it started out as the bigger wedge on the cast on edge. The white section, being the skinniest at the beginning only yielded 16 stitches worth of yarn per row to add to the cast off edge, which was demanding 54, 55, 56 stitches. I don't know how many repeats I yanked out of the white. I have blocked the entire episode from my mind in order to preserve my sanity.
There were pastries and encouragement from the cat. 102 live stitches on both ends. It's a miracle everyone in my family survived. Suffice it to say I eventually had enough white to finish and the actual final knitting of the 10-row borders on each end was a bit of a letdown considering all I'd been through to get to that point. Suddenly I was casting off and done. Blocking and photographing. Rav posting and blogging about the whole sordid mess.
Now what the heck do I talk about? I'll think about it while I'm wearing my new socks....
