Whether knitting for 1 year or 10, we have all had a knitting nightmare. A knitting nightmare can mean different things to different knitters but it’s basically whenever you get that sinking feeling deep in your chest after you realize what just happened…that feeling like your heart disintegrated and you have no air in your lungs. Nightmares can range from seeing a beautiful pattern, buying the yarn, and knitting a hat 3 sizes too small to having your lovely son who is learning to use scissor cut the lace yarn feeding into your almost completed shawl to simply picking the complete wrong colors. We also have experience in trying yarn-y things we have seen on Pinterest and having them fail miserably. This post is by no means meant to poke fun at making mistakes because everyone makes them. We wanted to highlight a few entertaining nightmares in order to give them a good laugh and move on! If you don’t have any failures, how can you measure how far you’ve come?
Thanks Pinterest, we NAILED IT!
Here is a Pinterest fail of epic proportion. These genius knots look just like yarn balls so we thought it would be adorable to make a few. We didn’t really have an intended purpose yet but who does? We could have put them in a glass vase or maybe hung them somewhere. Well, we could have done a plethora of things if this project didn’t turn into a frustrating knotted ball of nothing that a cat nommed on for the better part of the afternoon. But this step-by-step/picture-by-picture tutorial made it look easy so we tried and tried! We couldn’t possible be this dense, right? Wrong!
Football Shoulders Capelet of Awful
This nightmare comes from our photographer, Emily L. In 2009, she wanted to knit something for her sister’s birthday. She scoured Ravelry and finally decided on Shell Dance Capelet by Jane Thornley which is a lovely, drapey capelet. It’s advertised as a “stash-busting project” because it uses small amounts of multiple colors. She knew her sister would love it so she set out to find the perfect yarn. Now. The pattern calls for light, fine fingering yarn but, Emily L knew what she was doing and purchased worsted weight wool in a multitude of colors. She also thought it would be nice to alternate a solid panel with a gradient/gradual color change panel. Thinking back, this would have been great on a cowl or scarf but this was a loose capelet with drop stitches…no ma’am. So she knit. And she knit. To quote her directly, “Why didn’t I stop sooner?” The thing turned out to be this huge mess appropriately named the Football Shoulders Capelet of Awful. It was so huge that it dwarfed her over-sized office chair while taking pictures. It was bad. REALLY bad. Wrong colors, wrong yarn, wrong everything! Luckily, she had time before her sister’s birthday to knit something new. Thanks to Football Shoulders, Emily L bought her first skein of “fancy” yarn and knit a nice scarf for her sister. What happened to her capelet, you ask? She had no other choice but to frog it and make some great coffee cozies, of course! There was no other option and she NEVER wanted to see that capelet again.
Jupiter Hat is Out of This World
Jessica was looking for a new fun hat and fell in love with the design of Jupiter Hat by Suzanne Strachan. This was only her second hat so she was very excited to get started and FINISH! The pattern used DK weight yarn so she stash dove to find something bulky that she just knew would work. Starting slowly, she managed to get the brim to fit correctly so she sped up her knitting in order to wear it…now! This caused some problems. She misread the pattern and kind of just went with it, blindly knitting based on how she thought it was supposed to look. To her dismay, the fit was, as she put it, awkward. Since she loved the pattern so much, she tried to love it but could not. This hat is now lost in space. It may have a new home as a Goodwill purchase or it could still be in Jess’s closet hanging with the dust bunnies. Or her real bunny! Wherever it is, it will be brought back to life someday as Jess has plans to knit Jupiter Hat again! This time, she will pick the right yarn and follow the pattern closely.
We would love to hear your knitting nightmares and share in the glory with you! We would also like to make up for the nightmare by awarding a skein to the best knitting nightmare story. Why not celebrate the past mishaps by knitting a new flawless project, right? To enter, comment below with your story by Friday, October 31st at 12 PM Eastern. If you have pictures to share, post them to Instagram with #eatsleepknit and #knittingnightmare.
eatsleepknitblog 
I bought a ton of Cascade Lana D’Oro from a LYS. After knitting a whole Mara Shawl in one color, my 1st shawl, I noticed that it kept getting holes. I decided to make a Pipers Journey from the 2nd color a few months ago. It started developing holes before I was even finished knitting. I wound all the skeins and realized that it was fraying and falling apart as it was wound. This was a Harry Potter Knitting Crochet House Cup project on Ravelry an totally screwed up my timeline. I still have 7 more skeins in a 3rd color. I’m afraid to wind them. I bought these on sale before the store and stock were sold to the new owner.
My very first project was a scarf in my “Knitting 101” class. A very simple scarf, http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/fringe-block-scarf. Magically, my scarf began to grow wider, so, I figured out how to k2tog (all by myself!!!) and I “fixed” it. Now, being from Iowa, I have a lot of pride for my state…. so, imagine my “pride” when I got done with section 1, & had a knitting of Iowa in front of me. I finished the dang’ed thing, but it’s now a nice comfy bed for my kitty to lay on in her window. I’ll instagram it for your enjoyment 🙂
I started knitting skew socks with a commercial self-striping yarn which was on sale. I hated the yarn, and I also did not like the pattern. I saw so many cute FOs but knitting socks on the bias did not work for me! I couldn’t rip out this awful yarn, but I had enough left for 2 vanilla socks. Blech! I didn’t even tKe a photo of my skew it was so awful and crazy-making.
I’ve been frantically knitting Christmas gifts for my ridiculously large family with a deadline of Mid-November before our trip to New Orleans for months. I’ve finished a number of projects and nearly finished a few more. The finished items and nearly finished all lived in my knitting bag, as a reminder that I need to get around to blocking the finished items, and finishing the others. Typically, my knitting bag is hung from the back of a chair, but this past week it was left on the floor. One of my cats decided that my knitting bag resembled a litter box. I discovered this when I picked up the bag to take to work with me so I could knit during my lunch, as usual. Thankfully, most of the items are okay. But some of those finished or nearly finished items have a faint smell of cat pee. One wound skein of Blue Sky Alpaca got the worst of it. I don’t know if I should finish the affected items (fingerless gloves and a cowl) with them hopes that when I block them, I can wash the smell out, or start looking into alternatives. I’m not sure if I can try to wash the tainted skein, or knit with it, then try to wash the item, or just give it up and buy a replacement. I also need to buy a new knitting bag.
Over Rhinebeck weekend, I knit a second Dragonfly Sock. When I got home, I realized the first had been lost (looooooooong store, involving a jerk of a seatmate). I did have enough yarn for a third, but I put the completed second sock on to make sure I loved it enough to knit it again. When looking at it, I saw that I had dropped a stitch in the gusset then picked it up leaving…. a hole. Next.
Oh, but my favorite was my sarbah77’s Painted Forest Ribbed Hat: a disaster because, well, LOOK AT IT. And my husband thought it was so hysterically awful he wore it. IN PUBLIC. Then he lost it (legit lost it) and I was so relieved.
In January 2013, I knit a Moonshine cardigan in Madelinetosh Pashmina color charcoal. I picked out beautifully matching gray buttons and was smiling as I cast off the finished project looking forward to wearing in to work the next day. As I prepared to sew on my gray bottons, my daughter asked, ‘What’s that?’ I held up the cardigan for her inspection and she grabbed it from hands exclaiming, I love it! It’s so soft. Can you please, please knit me one?”
“Uh…Okay”, I said “what color would you like?”
“I want it exactly like that…same color, same size”, she replied while dancing around the living room in my two weeks of hard work.
“But…But it’s not your size, its two sizes too big…”
She cuts me off with, ” That’s the size I want, I like my cardigans big.”
(PANIC)
Okay, I hate knitting the same thing twice in a row (same color, same size), so I reluctanlty say, “You can have that one and I’ll knit another one for me” I show her the buttons I’ve chosen and she decides she does not like them! We go to the ‘button store’ and she choses gaudy burgandy buttons that I HATE.
She wears it all the time; It’s her favorite sweater!
http://www.ravelry.com/projects/teenap/moonshine
I’ve knit my own Moonshine in Madelinetosh Pashmina color Iris since then, and I love it. However, everytime I see hers, my heart races, my stomach drops and my chest gets tight.
AND, everytime I finish a project, I anxiously wait for her to ‘claim’ it, heart in my throat and stomach lurching.
I was making the Bokeh tank this year. Used Shibui Knits Linen held together with Shibui Knits Silk Cloud. For those of you who’ve never used Silk Cloud, think really sticky hair, beautiful hair, but sticky hair nonetheless. It was late at night, well past when I would usually call it a day, but hey, I was almost finished, right? Have to finish! All the was left was a 3needle bind-off of the shoulders. Made it about halfway through when I realized, hmm, I should have turned it inside out first, this looks ridiculous. Tried to undo. You know the part about the really sticky hair? Not so good for undoing. So… I sort of destroyed the seem. No chance at a 3 needle bind-off anymore. Not especially attractive either, but I was like, well, I can live with it, I’ll just seem it up really really well. So I did. And held it up to admire my handiwork. And realized I’d sewn the wrong shoulder seams together (I’d sewn them to diagonal corners!). All I could see was hours and hours of labor and fancy yarn ruined! When I had been so close to success. There was no way I could fix it, I just kept making it worse…
Luckily I have a very patient mother who just happened to be coming for a visit. She spent 7 hours squinting and pulling at the thing and unraveling and unraveling (not quite right yet, not quite right yet). Fortunately she stopped before the whole thing was unraveled, but hey, she fixed the impossible. What would we do without mothers to save the day!
And yeah, it was the second time I seamed shoulders to the wrong shoulder (the first time was front to front and back to back). But hey, I’m sure it will never ever happen again.
I spent weeks knitting a koolhas hat (by brooklyn tweed) oh so many cables. Taught myself to cable without a cable needle. It was his second birthday present. Lovely malabrigo worsted in lettuce…awesome hat.
So he gets up on his second birthday, tears into the paper, puts it on. And it fit the crown of his head. I almost cried. Kid has the worlds biggest head. He turned 5 last week, and I have to knit him adult sized hats for his 21″ head.
I ordered some great hand-dyed yarn to make Color Affection shawl after the Yarn Harlot had made one. It was even in a colorway based on the cover of her new book. I knit in part to relax, but am always worried about my edge stitches being too loose. Instead of a beautiful Color Affection shawl, I have a beautiful horned kerchief!
Once upon a time there was a girl (me) who was invited to her boyfriend’s step-grandparent’s 50th anniversary dinner. This dinner was a dress & tie attire affair so the girl thought it would be the best opportunity to make something to compliment my dress in the form of this Annis. A Beautiful tonal blue yarn with beads in place of nupps and , coincidentally and at the time, my first ever shawl. Unfortunately the only picture I ever got was only of the lace edge. I loved this shawl and worked dilligenty on it and was doing an absolutely marvelous job. At this time, when it was almost completed, I decided to spend a weekend with my boyfriend at his mother’s house (before he moved in with me). We had a very long hike planned, a birthday dinner at his other grandparent’s house and I lived an hour away. Now begins the start of my no good day and the knitting nightmare that will forever live in my horror stories.
Saturday AM the boy, a dog I was babysitting, and myself set off for a 8 mile hike along the Crawford-Ridgepole Trail in Holderness/Sandwich NH. The hike began well, if not a bit wet, and we summited up on Mt Morgan around 8am and continued on to Mt Percival and beyond. About a half mile past the summit of My Percival is when it all began and I slipped climbing up a rock and my face (namely my lip and mouth) met Mr. Hard Rock. Promptly sitting down with copious blood coming from my mouth and numb because I hit it so hard I was feeling to try to make sure I did not knock my teeth out. Point for me! I did not knock my teeth out of damage them in anyway.. however.. I did manage to cut the inside of my lip quite badly with said teeth as well as cut the outside of my lip on the rock.. Blissfully it was hard enough that I really felt no pain. Only numbness.. and the lip was swelling like a balloon quite quickly. After sitting and assessing myself I wanted to turn back.. I knew we only had to backtrack 1/2 mile then we could go down the trail at Mt Percival then walk 1/3 a mile down the road to our car. It was shorter back to the car then it was to continue on with our hike. Against better judgement however my boy griped, moaned and seemed frustrated with this decision so I grudgingly went forward instead of back (He learnt his lesson). I was already nervous after one fall and it was still wet, my attitude had gone south and I was upset that he just wanted to keep going. As I went I continued to have slips until it cummilated with me slipping on the way down and landing flat on my arse which prompted a full on panic attack. And .. I am not prone to panic attacks. But there I was in the middle of a trail far away from any “escape” points and well past the shorter to turn back point but there I am on my arse unable to breath, crying, catching my breath and unable to talk. It took me about 15 minutes to collect myself enough to continue. Now after this really bad day all I wanted to do was GO HOME. Just end it, find a warm bed a mug of cocoa and pretend the world around me doesn’t exist. .. Instead… remember that birthday party I mentioned? Yeah… Instead of him just saying “Okay, back to the car we can go home” He just had to go to the birthday party.. and me in my mood, post panic attack, just wanting to go home and pretend this day didn’t happen and to store it back in the “memories not to be replayed” file… He had to drag me to his entire family for me to play nice, smile, deal with all those questions of “what happened to your lip” and not wanting to talk about it… For THREE hours. Finally it ended.. and finally we got to go home. We get home … and there on the kitchen table (which is not where I left it) is my shawl. Now.. my shawl was in the boyfriend’s room.. in a plastic zip lock bag inside a larger grocery bag (the reusable ones). I get closer and see the bag has been chewed through… I inspect it. While we were gone for the day my boyfriend’s mother let her destructive little football dog downstairs (which she never does) then left her unattended long enough to take the ziplock bag out of the bedroom, upstairs to the living room.. to chew through the plastic, to pull the shawl out.. to chew through the cable wire, to knot the remaining ball into unusable spittle and to drop over 100 stitches .. and lose two stitch markers. If anyone has made the Annis before when you get to the short row section if you drop those stitches and loose the accompanying stitch markers you are pretty well screwed. And me after my entirely bad, no good, horrible day … I took the shawl downstairs and sat on the bed.. and frogged the whole damnable thing while sobbing my eyes out and not caring about the beads as they pinged everywhere with my boyfriend looking helplessly on .. By this point he knew how I was at this exact moment was entirely because of his own stubborn ass being. After it was frogged and in this giant pile I just left it there and went to take a shower. The boy wound it into a ball for me and collected all of the beads and put it all away and bought me new needles after but.. the damage was done. I didn’t want to look at the pattern, needles, yarn or beads just then and put it in time out. And finally officially abandoned the project. The yarn had still not ever been used.
I always have knitting on me. Last year at this time I knit my first ever pair of socks and started on my second after Christmas. I finished one and started the second. After a trip to target I realized that I had lost the completed sock. Gone! I never did find it, I keep it’s mate on my desk in remembrance. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson but fast forward to the Q2 challenge and guess what went missing the very night I finished it? My Q2 project! I had to reknit the whole (little) thing so I could submit, if only I took a picture first!
Hmmm, how about the felted slippers I made for my friend’s size 7 feet? I washed them FIVE times in a top loading washer… with jeans, tennis balls, towels… everything I could think of. A wine bottle fits in the finished slipper. Picture when I get home!
I may also pull out my first sweater and take a picture for y’all. If I wore sweater dresses, it would be awesome. It’s still knit because I haven’t had the heart to frog it yet!
I was taught to knit by my mother. She taught me to cast on/off, knit and purl. Unfortunately, then she passed away. I inherited all her needles/yarn/pattern books.
So 10 year old me decided that I was going to try something harder, and knit a fair-isle tam, for my father for Christmas. I grabbed the pattern book, needles that looked ‘about the right size’, yarn in colours I thought my father would like, and got to work.
Well, I figured out the ‘knitting in the round’ part. I figured out the Fair-isle part. I figured out the new stitches since the pattern book had a glossary, and I was quite proud of myself.
What I didn’t even know was an issue was tension. I didn’t know why there were different sizes of needles, or that the thickness of wool actually matters. I just thought it was choice.
That hat was big enough to be a dog bed. It was absolutely huge! And I was somehow convinced that if I just followed the rest of the pattern, somehow, it would work out.
It didn’t. I don’t actually remember what happened to that hat (I think I unraveled it). My dad got books for Christmas instead.
I had a made a few socks in the past, and decided I could do it without a pattern. Everything was fine until I got to the heel flap. I don’t know if it was my overconfidence, or my inability to realize I had small feet. I made the heel flap ridiculously long. I continued to do the decreases on the gusset happily…until I realized I had gotten to the toe…without finishing the gusset decreases. So I just kept going with the decreases to make the toe.
I was the most ridiculous sock I every made. AND IT GETS WORSE. I decide to make the second sock of the pair and, for some reason, I loose my ability to count. I cast on 80 stitches instead of 60. I don’t notice until I get to the heel flap. Instead of pulling back, I KEEP GOING. So not only do I have two socks with the gusset decreases merging into the toe, one is way bigger than the other.
They were the ugliest, saddest pair of socks I ever made.
The only knitting nightmare I can remember was from NaKniSweMo 2013. I had just finished up making my first sweater ever, and really wanted to start another one. I lazily swatched for Quay by Veera Valimaki – like didn’t even swatch the correct thing to swatch for it; I just did some lazy stockinette and even left it on the needles. Well, when it came to splitting the sleeves off from the raglan section, the underarm was almost TWO INCHES TOO SHORT. I had to figure out how to expand on the raglan section without adding any increases, or it would have been way too wide on me. THEN the fisherman’s rib was so heavy (not to mention the pockets on the bottom) that the entire thing sagged down below my butt after I washed it! Not only did it still fit poorly, but it was a tunic! Lastly, the folded collar at the top stretched out so it turned into a boat-neck cardigan instead of staying a crewneck. Worst. Sweater. Ever!
I eventually frogged the entire thing after a few months and it’s now a short-sleeved sweater that fits a lot better!
Earlier this year, I made a Camille Cardigan out of Malabrigo Merino Chunky. My mom liked it so much that I snooped around and tricked her into picking out a colorway (Brillante) that I promptly ordered in order to make her one of her own before her birthday in July. I spilled the beans early because I needed to measure her and make adjustments based on what she wanted. Well, my mom surprised me and asked me to make a much larger size so she could have an over-sized comfy sweater. I advised her against this since my mom is only about 5′ tall, but as the birthday girl and recipient, she insisted, so on I cast. I tried to talk her out of her size choice again the first time I put the yoke on her and the shoulders went a good five inches down her arm. Alas, she insisted, so I continued to knit. I fell behind in my knitting and was already two months late by the time I got to the sleeves. I raced through one sleeve before I noticed that the colors were pooling at the bottom. I told myself it would be a cool design element and moved on. The second sleeve turned out the same. If it wasn’t bad enough that her birthday sweater was 2 months late, it just *looked* not-quite-right. I tried not to panic because I know what wonders blocking can yield. So I blocked, blocked, and blocked.
When my mom finally tried it on, it was long enough to be a coat. The sleeves were huge at the top since I had blocked the chest so much to eat up some of the shoulder width, the collar wouldn’t stay up, and the sleeves looked downright ridiculous. We had a nice mother-daughter moment when we sat in her room and I made her help me rip the whole thing out.
I knitted a pair of what I have dubbed “Shortsheeted mittens.” Just like when you shortsheet somebody’s bed as a joke, only these are shortsheeted mittens, and no joke. They were my first pair of cabled mittens, and I couldn’t figure out why they seemed child sized, but with very long arms. Finally it dawned on me when I was working on the second mitten that I had started the thumb way too late, on the second row of the second cable repeat, instead of on the first repeat. So no wonder they came out so short! Link:
Shortsheeted mittens
It all started with a basic hat knit from Rowan Big Wool. It was a blah, boring, warm and perfectly serviceable hat—at least, after I frogged it and started over so it would fit my head. I wore Boring Hat Mark II one day in the snow, and it got wet. What followed were a series of bizarre actions that seemed to make perfect sense at the time but are difficult to explain in retrospect.
First, I slung my poor, damp hat over a sconce to let it dry evenly in proper hat shape. The lights weren’t on, so what was the harm?
A few hours later—you saw this coming, right?—it got dark. Shortly thereafter, a noxious smell spread in my apartment. Something was burning. This is probably a good time to mention that I have a healthy fear of fire. I tore around the apartment in a panic, sniffing madly. (The cats, who had long since concluded that humans do strange things for no apparent reason, didn’t even wake up.) The oven was off. The stove was off. What could it be?
By the time I realized that the burning something was my hat, it was smoking. I plunged into a bowl of cold water. Was it enough? Had I successfully averted disaster? If my sodden hat were to suddenly defy all the laws of physics and burst into flame, I’d like it to have a limited supply of oxygen—and preferably not the same source of oxygen that the cats and I use, at that.
So I did what any reasonable person would do: I put it in the refrigerator. And I forgot all about it for two weeks or so.
When I next conducted a “what’s that smell?” bachelor-style fridge purge, I found the hat, still neatly tucked into its metal mixing bowl bath. Closer investigation revealed two new problems:
1. The charred bit smelled AWFUL and had an oddly flaky texture, and
2. It had become a lovely basketball cozy.
After a bit of experimentation, I determined that I could scrape the charred flakes off the rest of the hat, so I did. The smell went with them…mostly. Enough, anyway. I finally felted it back down to the size of my head, this hat that had been too small when it first came off the needles.
Five years later, there is still a visibly, um, toasted spot on the surface of the hat. I keep meaning to needle-felt a design onto that spot but never seem to get around to it. So it remains a blah, slightly less boring, warm and still perfectly serviceable hat, stashed in my entryway with all the beaded and cabled and downright pretty ones I’ve knit since.
My knitting nightmare wasn’t from a finished project gone wrong- because it never made it that far. I was knitting the Dandy Scarf by Dull Roar in Handmaiden’s Maiden Hair yarn when I learned that my cat really loves mohair. The project was about 2/3rds finished when I left it sitting on the sofa and returned to find the yarn ball and scarf had been chewed and clawed into an unrecognizable mass. To make matters worse, in his fervor, the cat had even chewed through the cable of the Addi needles I was working on. I ended up scooping the whole mess into the trash.
As a novice knitter, I made a lovely jacquard pullover vest ( sort of like a tank top) in shades of blue and purple. I splurged on the yarn. I actually wore that vest to work ( teaching) and my students loved it! Then one little guy spilled some watercolor paint. In helping him clean it up, my beautiful vest got splattered. That evening, without thinking, I popped it in the wash. Needless to say, I have never again felted any knitting so easily! Forty years later, I can still close my eyes and see that pathetic hunk of wool coming out of the wash. Why is it we never recall our successes with such clarity?
When I was first starting to knit, I had not quite learned the difference between US and metric sizes. I read a hat pattern as calling for 8 needles. So I grabbed my 8 mm needles and cotton yarn (oh baby knitter still learning about yarn and elasticity) and got started. After several false starts, it was my first time knitting in the round, I was halfway through the pattern before I was like wait a minute this thing is huge!!! Went back to the pattern and figured out the whole US vs metric. I could have frogged the “hat” but decided to plow through and make a bag. Now, I always triple check the needle size.
I’ve made many poorly fitting and unflattering items (St. Bart’s Mini Dress! Martha’s Coming Home Poncho! AH!) But by far the most frustrating epic fail project was Kristin Omdahl’s Seashell Skirt
(http://www.ravelry.com/projects/anyagirl/seashell-skirt).
How many things could go wrong with a mostly stockinette tube that is supposed to go over your butt??? How do I hate thee project, Oh let me count the ways!!
1. I chose the wrong weight of yarn and only noticed after knitting half of the skirt when I realized “hey, this skirt is sheer!”
2. After wasting money on the wrong yarn, I decided to go cheap and buy nasty yarn from a big box craft store. In my haze of anger I didn’t notice that said cheap yarn contained ONE BALL from a different dye lot. I didn’t actually realize this though until I laid out my wet skirt to block it and saw that the top 1/3 of it was a darker teal than the rest. Unintentional ombre? Boo.
3. Then while actually making the danged skirt I had to re-do the bottom scalloped portion about 3 times (+1 for the sheer skirt incident) because I didn’t slip all the stitches the same and didn’t do all my M1s the same and it looked like a sloppy floppy mess… can’t I just get to that easy stockinette part already!?
4. After all this, my light teal/dark teal skirt is dry. I insert the drawstring and pull it on. Aaaand it falls right off. As I stare at the skirt puddled around my feet it dawns on me that I had forgotten about negative ease. I had made the skirt about 4 sizes too large.
I am so mad that I don’t know whether to give the skirt to Goodwill, unravel it instantly, or take it out in the alley and burn it. I decide to fold it up and hide it in the back of my closet because I am too crestfallen to even take a picture of the travesty that is the humongo skirt. Ironically about 2 years pass and my mother in law asks me how the skirt is going. I get all flustered with renewed annoyance and bust out “I don’t know I hate it it doesn’t fit me I don’t want it you can have it!!!” So I give it to my mother in law as an early birthday present and what do you know. It fits her perfectly. She loves it. She wears it to church two weeks in a row. She even says “it makes my butt look sexy!” Who would have thought. Damn you skirt.
I don’t think there is enough space on the comments for all the nightmares I have encountered, but here’s my biggest hits:
First, there’s my very first project; this was supposed to be a blanket and I had some stockinette and seed stitch sections. The first problem was that I didn’t understand that the working yarn had to be moved from front to back as you knitted and purled the seed stitch, so I ended up doubling my stitches and couldn’t figure out why. So my 100 stitches turned into around 200 stitches, which barely fit on the straight needles I was using. I tried to fix it by dropping stitches, but that created big holes. Then I tried the stockinette section, but I didn’t understand the difference between right side and wrong side, so each stockinette section is on different sides. Plus, it was knitted in the cheapest, crappy yarn. It is now a blanket for my dogs.
Second, there’s my sweater I made when Madelinetosh Dandelion came out – I was so excited to try the linen yarn. I went to run some errands and since my dogs have been so good, I decided that they didn’t need to be crated. Well, I took a few hours to get back and my young male (Lou) decided to “help” by chewing through my needle and ripping back half the sweater. Plus, there were little pulls everywhere. I was able to fix it, but due to some sewing issues, I plan on ripping it out and using it for something else.
Or, there’s my latest fiasco in which I washed my beautiful purple and yellow Carabe cardigan with commercial detergent. The purple bled so badly the cheery, bright yellow turned into “my dog peed on the white carpet” yellow. Once again, I plan on ripping it out and the purple is destined for a blanket.