Mistakes are More Instructive than None

So far, I've made two mistakes knitting my "Two at Once" socks.

The first was not really a knitting mistake: I didn't divide my yarn into two balls. Usually I knit socks from both ends of a skein, inside and outside, so my socks meet in the middle. But since I had both ends involved in the knitting and both ends returning to the ball, when I found that the yarn was overtwisting as I knitted, there was no way to let that twist spin out. Either I would have had to spin the knitting two opposite ways at one time, pinching it off in the middle, or the ball.

I don't know how a dyed-in-the-wool knitter would deal with this, but I used my weaving equipment. I hung the knitting from the top peg of my warping mill, and wound off both ends of the ball onto the warping mill until I reached the middle. Then I cut the yarn in the middle, and wound one end on my woolwinder, and the other end onto my 4-foot aluminum level. (It was long, straight, lightweight and handy!) Last I wound the yarn off the level into a ball with the yarn winder.

The second mistake was the one you would expect: I crossed the two layers of knitting. Even worse, I didn't cross just one stitch. I somehow switched balls entirely, so I was knitting the inner sock with the outer yarn, and the outer with the inner. I switched them at a needle junction, so I didn't notice my error until I had done a whole round, which is a whole round on both socks. Boo hoo! This would have been much harder to do if I was knitting striped socks like Elaine.

If I had crossed one stitch, my fix would have been simple. You can let that stitch go and work the slack from the extra into the surrounding knitting. I would rather not do that, but it can be done.

But since my yarns were actually crossed, I had to "frog". Rip it, rip it. Which is actually less scary than you would think. First, I prepared myself with two free knitting needles. Then, I pulled out one needle, and frogged the top sock, rrrrrrrrip! I picked those stitches up on one free needle, and then frogged the bottom sock. Rrrrrip! again. And picked up those stitches on the other free needle. Now I had the top sock stitches on the front needle, and the bottom sock stitches on the back needle. I picked them up alternately, "front needle, back needle," onto their original needle. Then I repeated this process until I got back to my error, and put the yarns back in their correct positions. And then I went to bed!

I think I am going to mark the balls somehow, maybe by running two colors of yarn through the middles of the balls!

Double-knitting Yahoo group

This morning our school started after a two-hour delay, so I didn't get enough knitting done yet for a new picture.