Blugupdate

To tell the truth, spinning the Blugly wool has been a pain in the pooper. It's kind of snargled and tangly, and doesn't draft as easily as the Muppet Entrails 1 & 2 did. It's possible that I felted it a bit in the dying process, so we'll see how the next batch goes. (We dyed two portions of the roving last weekend, so I have a second batch all ready to spin tomorrow night. Report to follow.) Fortunately, even if the whole bag of wool sucks, I love it too much to abandon.

See? Oh, and you'll notice that this yarn is not blurry.
That is because Dug got me a NEW CAMERA for Valentine's Day, because he is brilliant and handsome and wonderful. Now if only he could make me be able to knit a gauge swatch with any tiny degree of correctness.

The sweater I'm designing Blugly for calls for a gauge of 18 stitches = 4 inches on size 8 needles. It just so happens that Lovely Jennifer gave me some size 8 needles she didn't like. Excellent! I knit a swatch and MY gauge was approximately 18 stitches = 237 inches. And I'm a really tight knitter. So I don't know what's going on. I had a similar problem using a DK weight yarn trying to knit a hat - the gauge was all over the place. I hope this isn't a nightmare in the making.

Luckily, a happy accident has occurred. I looked at the pattern after swatching with a couple of other sizes, and it says to use size 8 and then size 7 needles for the ribbing. I was thinking it said size 6 for the ribbing, so I had ordered that size from Knitpicks this morning. And THANK GOODNESS, because it looks like size 6 needles will be just the right size for the whole darn sweater.

I'm kind of happy about that because even though knitting on smaller needles means the project will take longer, the Blugly yarn is closer to DK than worsted and when I was swatching it looked a lot better on the smaller sizes. Plus, I've been knitting socks on tiny needles for so long that using the smaller ones feels more comfortable. Not to mention, people will be really impressed with me when they see me knitting a huge buffalo-sized sweater (assuming my gauge stays stupid) on small needles.

In other news, I have finished ONE of the Tofutsies socks and have almost started the second one. True to form, I cast on 16 stitches, knit two rows, realized I'd utterly botched it, ripped it out, cast on 16 stitches, knit halfway up the toe and realized on the first sock I'd cast on 20 stitches and used an entirely different increase pattern. So the toes did not match at all. I'll be starting on Take 3 shortly.