Busy Fun makes Mistakes!

On Saturday we went to the Kitchener's Children's Museum. I had read in Rob's engineering magazine that "Engineers Without Borders" was doing something about bridges and K'nex constructions toys for kids 6+. They were there, but I have to say, the volunteers were stereotypical engineers--not too socially interactive, LOL. Rob and Huey built some dunebuggies with the K'nex while Lucy, Megan and I explored another area. They wouldn't have cared if Lucy also wanted to build, but she wasn't interested.That's Rob and Huey, disobeying the "No Faces" sign on the pin board. You can just see Rob's face. I don't know what Huey was pointing at. I think Megan had run away, LOL.


It's a nice, small townish museum. Loads of space. Much of it was too old for our kids though. But some of it was lots of fun, especially the 'playground' and toddler play area. I also really liked the "Plasma Car" (I think that's what they're called. It's a Canadian invention!).


You put your feet up at the front, and wiggle the steering wheel back and forth really quickly to get it to go. Of course, there were no instructions, but I had seen them on TV a long time ago, and they're in a lot of the catalogues for places like Grand River Toys. No one else wanted to bother to try to get it to go, so I hopped on, LOL. Megan really enjoyed being pushed around, but it seemed everytime she tried to do anything, she fell and bopped her head. You would've thought she'd have slept longer on the way home, LOL.

On the trip I worked on a new pair of mittens for Huey who's mitts from last year disintegrated. I thought, I'd make a pair with flames and felt them. Sound familiar? At least this time I realized I'd have to knit them flat. I got the cuff just about done on the Kitchener trip...then realized that felted ribbing doesn't make good ribbing. I had seen a pattern where the mitt body was provisionally cast on with cotton, then felted, and the cuff ribbing worked after the felting. So rip rip rip...Got more done on Sat/Sun/Mon night....but these are not the 'whip them up fast mitts' he needs!

On Saturday at some point, I went to do another row on a baby blanket I've had on the LK150 for a while. I'm doing the simple lace pattern in the manual that makes a ^^^^^ pattern. It was almost big enough. I was transferring stitches for the last row of the lace pattern and I found a mistake!


Do you see in the bottom, how there should be two eyelets side by side, and they go off diagonal from each of these? See in the top one where I forgot the second eyelet? DOH!


But I can fix this, I thought. Not until Sunday when it was somewhat quiet. The neat thing about the knitting machine is that each stitch is held by a latch, so you can easily see how each stitch relates to others, horizontally and vertically. It shouldn't be too hard to fix.



I thought I should start at the bottom, and that was probably correct, although it meant the hardest/longest fix first. I dropped the stitches, and (I thought) found the loop that should have been the yarn over and worked the column back up from there, and then did the column up from the adjacent k2tog. Then I dropped the two stitches for the next eyelet/k2tog...and had a total brain fart and couldn't remember how to do it! Got that one done, and the top one was pretty easy because it was the two rows that had just been knit so it could be done on the latches, instead of trying to latch up each row with the latch tool.


I can finally convert stitches to make ribbing (you're always working on the purl side of the piece. If you want ribbing, or a knit stitch to show on the back side, you drop the stitch off and unravel it down. Then you use a tool--just like latch hooking--and work it back up. It's the same thing as if you drop a stitch in HK and you use a crochet hook to work it back up). But, trying to re-latch a column of purl stitches is just beyond me! I can't figure out where to put the latch tool--it has to go in from behind...


I thought I had gotten it all fixed, when I noticed that one of the yarn overs was a single strand. Argh. I kept dropping stitches and re-working them up, but that single strand just migrated up the eyelets. I was getting really really frustrated, and almost ready to just rip back those 6 rows.
I finally realized that I hadn't started the bottom eyelet on the right row. You can see the center bottom stitch is purple, and the pink strand at the bottom of the eyelet to the left of it should have been the eyelet and the single strand should have been the row that knitted the yarn over. Having used variegated yarn for this really helped! LOL.







And here it is, all finished!! It needs some tension adjusting, LOL. Was it faster than ripping out 6 whole rows? Maybe. It takes time to transfer all the stitches on each of the pattern rows, but the plain rows sure are quick! If I had gotten the mistake fixed the first time, it definitely would have been the faster way. But I'm glad I tried this way first, it's one of the nice things about knitting vs. crochet :)

And, if that wasn't enough in the mistakes department...I had my plastic surgeon visit on Monday. I was working on Lucy's pink and purple socks, the second one. I had put both in the bag (previously, the first one had been sitting forlorn on the table), and when I took the second one out, I realized I had another big mistake! I was half way up the leg and hadn't done the ribbing on the back of the leg!! Rip rip rip! Oh well. That's the life of a knitter!