Giotto Woe and the Cure for Giotto Woe

"We have the technology. We can rebuild her."



But before we get to that, this is how The Man and I enjoyed the Peace Cup final, which the Bianconeri lost by trying to shoot penalty kicks with their heads up their butts. Even ADP. Especially ADP. We started out with a bottle of an Italian sparkling red wine and a July sock and when the wine made the July sock too hard, we switched to a Stitch and Pitch square. The sock and square are now done, and I don't remember what the wine was, which is fine because it was too sweet for us. We'll stick to Prosecco. Only 9 more days to the beginning of the Serie A season.

And that brings me to Giotto woe. Remember how one of the fronts was too long? I knew it was coming, but I decided to ignore it instead of fixing it while it would still be easy to fix it. Sometimes when you try to embrace the idea that not everything has to be perfect all the time, you get scrooed end up with something that the compulsive part of you cannot live with. So to fix the Giotto sweater, I had to disassemble the Giotto sweater:

Not fun. Not fun at all. But my new replacement front is one the needles and might be done this week if there's anything good on the toob I get around to it. I thought I was done and I almost put the pattern book in the recycle bin. I'm glad I'm such a fucking pack rat I didn't.

Instead, because I didn't use up all the Giotto yarn, I started a Giotto scarf, which I now can't finish until the Giotto sweater is repaired, because I'm worried that I'll run out of yarn. This is ridiculous, of course. I have ripped out something and am using the yarn to make something smaller which means it will use less yarn, even with what I'll need for the re-edging and re-seaming.

This means that the Giotto scarf is in limbo, even though it doesn't need to be. And how, you may ask, does Dirtbunny distract herself from all this needless mental suffering? Cmon. You know the answer.

She retreats to her boudoir for a long sulk, because she's a big baby.

WRONG! She gets a wicked case of startitis. And so, behold:

Haha! Just kidding. This is actually an old project, a lace mohair cowl, which is almost mindless monkey knitting, and it would be done already if I didn't hate working with mohair. This is the last of the ancient mohair from days of yore. I don't think we'll be getting any more of that at the LYS.

Psych again! This is the March sock club sock, which is another not quite new project. This is the kind of thing you do four or eight rows on right before you go to sleep (instead of reading which is what normal people do).

Let's get to some real startitis projects shall we?

Numero Uno:

Here we have a lace scarf in lavender with a butterfly motif. Really! Can't you see the butterflies? OK, well, I just started so it doesn't have butterflies yet. The hard part was gettting the provisional cast-on right. A provisional cast-on leaves you with live stitches that you can pick up and knit onto later, which makes it great for adding an edging to, say, a butterfly scarf, so the edging looks the same on both ends when the scarf is worn. And also, a nephew sock. What you see there is how much sock you can knit when mildly sedated and riding in the car around the Beltway to a futbol game while giving The Man directions (because Dirtbunny is presumed to know where everything is, even places she's never been to before.) I'll have to compare the newphew sock circumference to the nephew foot circumference I got in the email today to see if we have a match.

This is a Ziggy sock. It's a toe-up jobbie. I am using Noro Kureyon Sock. Everyone loves Noro Kureyon. I dunno. It seems pretty itchy to me. We'll see.

This is a SIL sock. She picked the yarn. (I think she picked this yarn.) I'm using the March pattern from last year. If I remember correctly, it was a fun knit, and this is good yarn, so yay.

Good gravy! There's more? Yes there is. This is a baby blanket from Pam yarn in a traditional feather and fan pattern, which mind end up being completely oscured by the yarn's chenille texture. What-ev. It's going to be stripey, and the stripes will show off the waviness of the pattern, if nothing else.

This is not the endof the Pam yarn. I still have three beautiful skeins of red merino in sock weight. I had intended to use the yarn to knit a seed-stitch scarf for Ray-Ray, because he loved Pam too and she was heavy into seed stitch and its variations, so I thought it might be nice for him to have something that was sort of hers. Problem is, I mentioned this to Ray-Ray (to see if he would be OK with it) before I realized that it was sock weight yarn and I don't have enough for a scarf. I could make him three red socks, but Pamie probably wouldn't have made him socks. I could make a pretty, girly lace scarf, but I don't think that's Ray-Ray's thang. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it now. Hat? Dunno. Red mittens? Maybe. I'll have to ask him.

Are you wondering about the kimono shawl? It's in the drawer. I'm at the point where I'm waiting for more yarn to arrive in the mail and when it gets here, I'm going to have to blend the new with the old to obscure any dye-lot variations.

And that's how Dirtbunny forgets about how incompetent she is her most recent major fuckup her little mishap with the Giotto sweater. And that brings us to Tiki Tinkle Time, so I have to go now. I'm going to hit "publish" without proofreading. What's the worst that can happen?

Bunny Learns the Hard Way

I finished the Giotto cardigan. I sewed the seams and knitted the edging and put the buttons on and it was done. But I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Something was wrong. One of the fronts was longer than the other. So much longer that creative button placement and seaming was not solving the problem. It was simply not good enough. So I stewed about it for a while, and now it is done.

Meaning, I undid the edging and some of the seams and ripped back the too-long front and I'm going to do it over. Next step is to take the buttons off the other side, realign them, measure them, and come up with a plan for the do-over. I plan to cast on by the end of the day.

Needless to say I am a failure sad. To prove I am capable of knitting sometimes cheer myself up, here are the recently finished July socks.

I think maybe today is going to be the kind of day where I cast on a bunch of new things and finish nothing.

Math trouble

So here's a question for you. If you are making a cardigan and want both sides of the front to be the same size, is it best to knit the same number of rows on each side, or is it more accurate to measure and knit the same number of centimeters?


The correct answer is: Neither. Both methods lie. The only thing you can do is some twisted combination of the two and hope for the best.

My buttonholes do not match my button places, so I am going to have to realign my button markers. I've stopped aiming for perfect accuracy. It will turn out OK in the end.

By the way, this is a cardigan from Pam yarn. You may remember it from swatch day. Also, I am showing you a completed blue Regia self-striping sock. I told you it was nothing exciting. The stitch and pitch squares are almost done, and I'm thinking about what my next project should be. I've got a few sweaters on the list, and a cookie box full of leftover sock yarn, and a closet full of new sock yarn, and three or four Knitty.com patterns printed out and waiting for me.