What a Life!

I’m making a hat for myself. I’ve already made mittens out of the same yarn to wear when I exercise in cold weather. The intended use for the hat is the same.

Of course, I’m not using a pattern as I seem to be physically unable to do that these days. I thought and thought about how I wanted to make this hat. I finally decided that I wanted to take a stab at entrelac. If you’re not a knitter, entrelac is a special technique where you knit offsetting squares one by one and it looks kind of like basketweave.

Naturally, I did not do a swatch. I just started out knitting. [Nonknitters – a swatch is where you knit a small sample using the yarn and stitches you will use in the real project to get an idea of how it is going to look as well as an opportunity to calculate how many stitches you will need to achieve the desired size in the finished object.] The times when I have done a swatch, my gauge in the real thing never matched my gauge in the swatch so it was a waste of time anyway. My gauge matches the gauge published on the yarn label almost without exception so that is usually my starting point.

Truthfully, gauge is kind of like an insurance policy. The theory is that if you do a test swatch, you have a better idea of what the final result is going to be and you can make any necessary adjustments before you invest a lot of time in something. But if you gauge almost always matches the gauge published on the yarn label, how many times are you actually going to save yourself time by taking the time to do a gauge swatch?

Now in this instance, it might have helped me. The nature of entrelac makes its gauge quite different from the gauge of regular knitting. But I set out without doing a gauge swatch with a full understanding that I was risking having to rip the whole thing out if I didn’t like the final result.

And, ladies and gentlemen, I am not happy with the final result.

I have eightteen little squares on each round, and it’s two squares too big. When I try the hat on – it isn’t finished yet…just enough that I can try it on – there are little ripples where it caves in because it is simply too big. And I really wish I had done two more rows of ribbing. It would look just that much nicer.

That’s pretty much the conclusion that I had come to when I took it to my “knitting committee” this weekend – namely, the twice monthly knitting group I attend. I tried it on and everyone said it looked just fine and no one would notice the creases I was complaining about. Someone even told me, “Good enough is good enough. No project is ever going to come out perfect.”

And to a degree, I agree. Perfection is something to strive for, but not something one should necessarily expect to attain.

I quilt so I can have quilts, not for the love of quilting. But I knit because I love knitting, not because I want to have lots of sweaters.

Which leads to the reason why I’ve decided to rip it out and do it over…I can get twice as much enjoyment out of this project if I do it over. Not only do I have the pleasure of more knitting, I have the satisfacting of coming up with a better way of doing it as well as being happier with my result. And that, ladies and gentlemen, makes the designer in me a very happy camper.

Must go…I have some frogging to do.