Knitting Mayhem

So I am finally working on the Noro my sister bought for her scarf, but then gave up because three rows after she cast on she was so tight she couldn’t even push a needle through to make a stitch. Like most people, I think the Noro is beautiful and I totally want a Noro striped scarf, but when it comes down to buying the actual yarn, I get overwhelmed by the color selections. And possibilities. And wondering, what if these colors don’t exactly work with those colors? Clearly, I need to man up. And so I thought we had come to the perfect solution: by working on my sister’s scarf, I get to play with her Noro before I buy and she gets a scarf that’s longer than three rows long.

So you’d think.
Actually, the colors aren’t bothering me in the slightest. It is cool to watch these stripes slowly turn to other colors as I continue to knit. However, I think the operative word in that last sentence is “continue” because really, that hasn’t been the overall feel here. More like struggle. Muddle. Frog. I’m just short of calling it the undo scarf, as the more I knit, the more I undo, but I think I might have finally gotten the rhythm of this scarf, and so we are at a detente, the scarf and I, and slowly the rows continue to build.

The irony here is that this scarf is supposed to be my easy off-project project. You know, the one you go to when you get overwhelmed b the intricacies of the difficult pattern you’re working on and long for some simple knit purl? Yeah, that one. And as this is a simple 1×1 ribbing, it should be relatively mindless, save for the one slight hiccup: the edges. Aye, there’s the rub. Because the edges are really the only drawback to this scarf, and perhaps not so much a drawback, but more like I don’t think I understood just how important those edges are, nor just how close I was to being pushed over them. Metaphorically speaking.

Okay, so why am I so whiny about the edges?

Mostly because the edges are the only tricky part of this scarf. It’s the first time I’ve used two colors at the same time, so you have to bring the non-worked yarn up along the edge as you’re knitting the other one. And that sounds easy unless you’ve ever done that before, and in practice, it befuddled me. Also, they suggest using a slipped stitch selvedge. Again, in theory I understood what was going on. In reality, I had no freaking clue. Slip sti– waaaait, what? Why the second row and not the first? On both sides, or not? Clearly, I was not going to be able to sort it out until I rolled up my sleeves and got on with it.

It was, in a word, painful.

I think I’ve ripped this simple scarf out 9 or 10 times. Never getting more than eight stripes through; sometimes less than two. Sadly, the reality is you need to get going for a while to see where your mistakes are, and how you’re doing it wrong, before you can correct it. And I am probably more likely to rip something out if I’m still relatively close to the beginning, as much as it pains me to do so. Or perhaps that was just me. Thank God for YouTube and @iAudrey, because they were the only things that could show me a) how to try to do it, and b) how to fix it.

So now I’m on the right track. So far. We’ll see just how long this takes me — or if I even want to do another one for me. I hope I’m not sick of it by the end; I still want to do one for myself in Noro’s Silk Garden.

That is, if I haven’t been pushed over the edge by then.

(PS. Photos of scarf in progress to come. Waiting for, you know, light.)