Throw me a Lifeline

(or ...Too many AT THE SAME TIMES...)

Last night, I was working on my Blackberry Cabled Cardigan, which not only features cabling and double moss stitch (for my version), it also has a LOT of the dreaded phrase, "at the same time" .

There's neckline shaping/decreases AND AT THE SAME TIME with bust increases, then neckline decreases AND AT THE SAME TIME armhole shaping, then the knitter moves onto THREE "at the same times" of neckline decreases and AT THE SAME TIME armhole shaping and AT THE SAME TIME shoulder shaping.

It's enough to make a knitter want to grit her teeth and swear... a lot. However, this is where lifelines help, because everytime I hit a milestone where it's long enough to start the AT THE SAME TIME....I throw down a lifeline.

Of course, I almost didn't at one point, when I finished working on the left armhole shaping and was about to start the shoulder shaping, because, I had thought, "NAW, I'm on a roll! I got this!" (But the nagging part of my hindbrain kept arguing until I got out the brown sock weight yarn I normally use for lifelines and threaded it through the stitches on my needle, which took less than a minute.)

Oh, boy am I glad that I did, because about part way through I realized that I had forgotten to continue working on the neckline decreases AT THE SAME TIME as the armhole shaping AND the shoulder shaping WHILE maintaining (quoting the pattern) the "cable ....pat as best as possible throughout neckline shaping".   (You know things are going to get iffy when the pattern designer has to say "as best as possible....")

(Of course, the nagging part of me turned into the smug-I-told-you-so-me....)

Oofda. So I had to rip back, luckily to the lifeline (a mere rows back) and do all of the AT THE SAME times. Here's my lifeline, which you can't see all of because of the purl stitches on the cabling, but it did save me a ton of frustration and annoyance.

But lesson re-learned. A few moments adding a lifeline can save you TONS of heartache later.

Re-purpose & Re-use: The making of a cable needle

I'm working on the Trilobyte hat from Knitty.com's Summer '09 issue for my BIL who is a geologist. He has a lot of fossilized trilobytes at their house.

However, it does require cabling, and I walked out of the house without a cabling needle. My crochet hook is just too awkward and long to use and I'm incapable of just taking the stitch to be cabled off the hook without it laddering downwards. I was a tad frustrated at what should be a simple cabling project.

As I was eating lunch with chopsticks, I thought, "Hmmmm....." So, after lunch, I washed said chopsticks and used my scissors to score the wood so I could break it. Then using a handy-dandy pencil sharpener to give either end a point, I made myself a small cable needle.

It works just fine.

Photo taken with my mobile.