A cautionary tale

Hello there! It's a lovely sunny morning here, I hope it's the same where you are. Mr JK and I were woken up by the dawn chorus just before 5 o'clock this morning. The bird choir were certainly going at it hammer and tong, and it was lovely listening to it. A real sign that spring is on its way! This pot of mini daffodils has burst forth this week too.

I finished my Half Century socks this week. They're a 50th birthday present for Mr JK's cousin Monika. She's always appreciative of hand-knitted socks. I used the Circle pattern, and am really pleased how the pattern and yarn worked together.

I discovered my first sock casualty whilst sorting out the washing yesterday. One of my favourite pairs, Dublin Bay, in a Natural Dye Studio yarn, have got a hole in the heel. My mum would have got out her wooden mushroom and darned them. I've put them in my sock drawer to think about it!! These were the socks that the Yarn Harlot knit a few stitches of at I Knit in 2008, so I'm reluctant to throw them away. They hold too many memories!

Oh yes, talking of casualties, I have a tale of woe to tell you this morning. I've been trying to finish off some projects, and this week decided to concentrate on my Ripple scarf. I was just finishing the 3rd repeat of colours, a bit too late on Friday night, when I should have listened to my body and brain saying to me 'I'm too tired to concentrate'. But no, I chose to carry on, ignoring that little voice, and disaster struck. I came to change colours, and couldn't understand why I couldn't easily attach the new yarn and get the hook through the stitch. Nothing twigged, and I carried on trying to make a hole where there obviously wasn't meant to be one. Still nothing! I tried to unpick my last row - but couldn't, and ended up breaking the yarn. It still wouldn't pull out easily. Unperturbed, I carried on unpicking, one stitch at a time, to be left with a series of loops! It was only then that the penny finally dropped! I'd been trying to attach the yarn at the start of the scarf, hooking into the foundation chain! So my scarf, which looked a little like this, but 3 times longer

now looked like this, with lots of little loops where my first row of pattern and foundation chain had once been attached!

There was nothing else for it, I had to unpick the whole scarf, as I had no idea how to sort it out any other way. So my scarf then looked like this ....

Although you're probably not going to believe me, I think this disaster was actually a blessing in disguise. (Yeah, right!) It had already become obvious to me that I wasn't going to have enough yarn to make a scarf of any decent length, and I knew that it was going to be tricky to match up more colours to the mini skeins I'd already bought from the Natural Dye Studio. So what I've decided to do is to make a narrower Ripple scarf, and hook each block of colour for three rows instead of two (to minimise wastage on the yarn that's already cut). Hopefully it's going to work! Here's how it's looking so far.....

So the moral of this story is don't crochet when you're tired!! Have you had any knitting or crocheting disasters? If so, please share them with me, so I don't feel quite such a idiot! Have a good week!