WIP: Georgia

Oops! I meant to blog about this a few days ago but the weekend was a blur of work, sleep, and endless "terrible twos" tantrums. There was a fair bit of knitting taking place because of the latter but trust me when I say that there was also an equal amount of un-knitting happening too.

So this here is my fourth project for 12 in 2011. It's the Georgia cardigan by Jane Richmond. It's a top-down, fitted, and seamless cardigan that is knit in one piece (my favourite type of pattern!) and I'm knitting it out of SweetGeorgia Yarns Cashluxe Fine in the Oxblood colourway (one of my favourite yarns!). This pattern is a fairly easy and simple knit so you would think that it would just fly off the needles without any problems. Yeah...technically it should. But since this is me who is knitting this, that isn't the case. I'm knitting this up in a fingering weight yarn. Hand-dyed fingering weight yarn, that is. And with that the first thing that every knitter needs to know is that you should always, always, always alternate skeins when knitting a project with multiple skeins of hand-dyed yarn. Even if the skeins come from the same dye lot, it's a bit rare that all skeins will end up exactly alike. I'll confess that I lucked out when knitting both the Simple & SweetGeorgia Pullover and the Queen Bee cardigan, cause I didn't alternate the skeins at all. I know...bad knitter!!

This time around though, my luck has run out and although they look the same in skein form, the yarn definitely varies in shade. The first skein that I started knitting with is definitely lighter than the second and I'm just glad that I had noticed this before I was halfway through knitting with the first...yes, I'll admit that I didn't start alternating skeins until after I had divided up the stitches for the sleeves. Speaking of which, another major reason for the un-knitting: I had knit to just before separating the sleeves from the body when I realized that my stitch counts were off. So I tinked back and couldn't figure out where I went wrong. I took a look on Ravelry to see if anyone else had this problem and discovered that the pattern had been updated!! Grrrr!! Since I had downloaded and printed out the pattern before the updated copy, I had no idea! I had spent at least over an hour un-knitting and then re-knitting everything back to where it was. Crap. I hate that. Then to add to that, I had to un- and then re-knit a few more times after that cause I would forget about adding a buttonhole! Oi.

Now I'm knitting the body, which is nothing but pure stockinette (except for the button bands) with no shaping. So I'm really hoping that it'll be smooth sailing from here on in. Or did I just tempt the knitting gods by saying that? Crud...