Persistent Knitter

I’m making good progress on The Nanny Sweater.  Not much in the past few days, because I’m trying to finish Mike’s secret socks for Christmas.  I don’t have much farther - just a half of a foot and the toe.  The second sock has gone much faster because I can use the first one to compare it to for size.

So back to TNS.  Here’s the back, in outdoor early morning light, with no flash:

The color shows much more light purple in this picture than it really is.  But the flash kept washing it out and making it look darker. See?

This shows a closeup of the moss stitch (or seed stitch depending on who you ask on which day) and the cable.

As I knit my swatch and started the back, I was concerned that my moss stitch was coming out uneven.  When held up to the light you can see some slight holey areas, where in other places there are none.  Looking at the picture you don’t really see it; and when held up against a person, like you would wear it you can’t really see it either.  However, perfectionist that I am - I wanted to see if I could make it slightly better.  Thanks to some great suggestions from Mandella I tried a few things.

First: tugging on the yarn after each stitch either away or towards me depending on if the last stitch was a purl or knit.  This seemed to tighten the ‘holes’ up a tiny bit; but it was much much slower. 

The other technique was instead of putting my yarn over the top of the needle for a purl stitch, I put it under.  Theory with this would be that there is less yarn to wiggle around between the two stitches, and therefore - less holes.  The problem with this was it wasn’t necessarily slow on by doing the purls this way, but it flipped the front and back loop of those stitches on the next round so that I had to really look at my work to see which ones needed to be knit/purled through the back loop to get the stitches back to right.  Again, it might have helped a little bit, but was still very slow.

Frustrated with the whole process, I set aside TNS’s back for a bit, and cast on with some smooth yarn. (Debbie Bliss Wool/Cotton with 3.25mm needles). I knit up the same number of stitches as in my swatch for TNS.  After less than an inch I could tell my moss stitch looked just fine with the smooth yarn:

So it’s not me, it’s the yarn!!!!  I took all tiny swatch, my big TNS swatch and the back of TNS to my knitting group this past weekend to get some other opinions.  Thankfully, everyone agreed with me that yes, it was the yarn causing the inconsistencies in the moss stitch.

This yorkshire Tweed DK is beautiful stuff, but not easy to knit with.  It’s harder to get even stitches even in the stockinette portion because it catches on itself with the little nubblies and as I’ve babbled on endlessly so far the moss stitch portion is frustrating me as well.  From now on, I’m not going to even attempt to make it perfect, I’m just going to knit it normally without any additional stress; and hope that the moss stitch evens out a little bit more as I go on. For now it looks just fine, and  I’m excited to be making progress.  I’ve got the pattern memorized, which I suppose is good; I didn’t even have to refer to it to make the smooth yarn swatch! :)