Swatching

So sadly my "I'm going to go and do lots of knitting now" declaration yesterday did not result as desired.  Swatching can be so annoying.  Well first of all, before swatching, I had to chart out the pattern, which was written out row by row, thus, in my opinion, making a simple pattern much harder to understand the structure and rhythm of.  I know for many, charts are daunting and they prefer the row by row instructions, but not me.  I'm visual!  So that took... a while and was... annoying.

Then, I started out with US #17 size needles and the yarn doubled up per the pattern and... whoa, #17 needles are HUGE! The stitches were huge too - at first I thought maybe it could be nice kind of open but it became apparent the pattern was not going to read at all.  Cotton just isn't stretchy or fluffy enough.  So I ripped out my swatch (didn't even bother taking a photo) and scaled back to US #11 needles... which were still too big!  So I ripped back again (again no photo) and tried US #10.  This worked better, but then I decided the yarn doubled up was going to give too heavy a fabric.  The Voyager Lace stole had such a nice drape so I did what I probably should have done to begin with - used the same size needle and just a single strand of yarn.

And... I don't think this is the best pattern for the yarn, and it is definitely not the best yarn for the pattern.  Compare my swatch with the beautiful photo.

And by the way notice a) the row by row instructions and b) that the photo opposite the pattern is of a completely different blanket!

Anyway, I think I may have been doing my twisted stitches wrong but even so, it seems obvious to me now that a detail that relies on a single stitch wide "cable" to read is not the greatest for this yarn.  I need fatter cables!  I mean, it doesn't look too bad in the photos but they are not the flowing cables that I have been imagining.

So yeah, swatching is handy but annoying to do, especially when the knitting is relatively easy and you're just trying to see how it looks and how big it is (unlike my most enjoyable and exciting-to-knit swatch to date for the Print O' The Wave stole).  Me, I'm too impatient and just dying to get onto knitting the real thing, but I think I need to take my time figuring out the right pattern for this one.

Part of me wants to ditch the whole cable idea (I had this whole fantasy about how cozy cables look, like a sweater) and just go with Elizabeth Zimmerman's Garter Stitch Blanket (ravelry, brooklyntweed's amazing version) but, beautiful though that pattern is, that seems like a bit of a cop-out on my original vision.  I may need to bite the bullet and design my own cables... but do I really have the patience for that right now?  I think I'm going to try swatching the Cross Lane Cable Blanket (ravelry, flickr).  It has 4-stitch cables and it's already charted out, and I know the needle size, so I could jump right in and then decide on modifications/my own design from there.  

Ok see ya!

Comments

[Aim]

I'm with you, swatching always makes me feel so annoyed at having to WAIT to start the real thing, but the realist in me knows there very well COULD be trouble if I don't =) Good luck with that--maybe a different yarn for that pattern?