Just a Dishcloth

The two sweaters i've been working on lately (Komi and the wheat ear rib sweater) aren't going well. I realized that I had been in denial about the size of Komi, so I need to rip. I don't really feel like untangling the mess that shetland jumperweight yarn is going to become when I have 5 different colors in one big heap on the floor.

I thought the wheat ear rib sweater was going really well. I decided that it was going to be a raglan, and I knew how many stitches I had for the back. I decided how big I wanted the neck to be. I then consulted many published raglan sweater patterns, including Ann Budd's book of sweater patterns to determine at what rate I should decrease. Those patterns all suggested decrease rates that were similar to what I had calculated. I thought I was all set. It turns out that I made two mistakes:

1. I forgot that when you knit a raglan, the back decreases don't go all the way up to the shoulder.

2. The wheat ear rib pattern is a ribbing. It also has twisted stitches. These two facts mean that it pulls in A LOT. While the row gauge is similar to stockinette, the stitch gauge is not. There are more stitches per inch than in stockinette. This means that Ann Budd's decrease rate isn't going to work.

Here is what I have:



I have about one more inch of knitting before I need to have all the stitches outside the orange markers disappear. Perhaps this sweater will have a wider neck than I had planned. Or perhaps I will rip. We'll see. For now I'm going to knit that last inch and then move on to another piece. If there is ripping, it will be at the end.

To distract me from the sweater mess, I knit a dishcloth. I have never knit a dishcloth before, and I have never before had any interest in knitting one. Then I read the new Mason-Dixon knitting book, and suddenly had the urge to knit a dishcloth. I decided that it might be fun to have a colorful assortment of dishcloths to brighten up the chore of dishes. Here's the first one. I started knitting it on the subway, so I used the first stitch pattern that came into my head. In the future I'll probably consult a stitch dictionary, or at least think about it for more than 3 seconds before I start.



As soon as I finished, I wove in the ends and immediately tried it out. It doesn't work badly. It is possible that it requires the use of a bit more soap than a standard sponge, but it is cheerful. In my typical style, I did not just buy one ball of yarn to make dishcloths with to see how I liked them. Instead I bought 5 balls in different bright colors. You'll just have to wait until I knit them up to see what the colors are.