And remember, when I was done limping through the month of anti-motivation, I shoved it in a drawer? Well, first I tried to turn it into a screenplay, got 4 pages in (further than any screenplay I have written since the 4th grade), and then shoved it into a drawer?

On Tuesday, I opened the file for the first time in a long time. I deleted all the word-count toss-ins (“And then she tried to read this completely unrelated novel….”). And I printed it out.

In the RV yesterday on our way from one place to the next, I read it. The dismembered pieces of my zombie novel.

Really, It’s not even a novel yet. At around 28,000 words, it barely qualifies as a novella. Which is fine– it’s missing huge, major parts of the story– like the parts where zombies start rising from the dead, for instance– we go straight from “the guys are looking for tuxedos” to “the prom queen takes an axe to the slot machine-playing zombies.” Which is almost a relief– I would be very bothered if I’d actually completed the storyline in 28,000 words.

But… it’s good.

I mean, it’s “John laughed out loud” good. Yeah, it also sucks. And, again, it’s not finished. But….

It’s… good.

I might have to do something about that.

Yes, I am now baby-stepping in continental. One sock is knit English, the other continental.

Really, my brain might break.

Swatch #2: Stockinette Stitch

See the ribbing at the bottom there? It turns out, that’s supposed to be K1P1 ribbing (it’s K2P2 as shown). Frogged and reusing the yarn for Swatch 1, which I also frogged earlier.

Going on a recommendation in the TKGA group on Ravelry, I decided to re-start with Swatch #3, because Seed Stitch sometimes needs a smaller needle. This is my swatch #3:

Swatch #3: Seed Stitch

See all the little holes in it? Those aren’t supposed to be there. Aside from going down yet another needle size (which would mean knitting worsted yarn on size 4’s… not my preference), I don’t really know how to fix this problem. I snugged up all the stitches as I knitted them. Perhaps re-doing the swatch at a different time of day will help.

I also cast on and knitted about an inch of K2P2 to re-do Swatch #1 last night.

And as long as I have you here, here’s an update on the sweater-of-fear progress:

Susie Hoodie Sweater

I’m now at the waist shaping decreases. I am deathly afraid that I will run out of yarn, given the size of this sweater. I already know how many stitches I can get out of a skein of this yarn, so perhaps I should count up how many stitches it takes to make the whole sweater. Except I’m afraid that number will be so high, I will shove the sweater into my bag and never look at it again.

And a closeup of the cable pattern:

Susie Hoodie Sweater: Cables

The shawl I’ve been working on is going, albeit slowly. I have 42 grams of yarn left out of the 100 gram skein, which means I am more than halfway done. According to the pattern as written, I can cast off at any time and have a human-sized shawl.

Bold Casual Shawl

That’s it. I have a long ranty rant about yesterday and how technology kicked my butt, but suffice to say that the death of my keyboard was only one in a long series of instances of technology beating me up yesterday. I lost by 6 points for the day.

Gratuitous sock yarn picture: machine washable Jitterbug yarn in Popsicle colorway

I bought a purple binder and put the instructions into it:

I found some downloadable knitting journal pages and printed them out:

I put swatch #2 into a sleeve protector (it’s still unblocked!)

No, really. It’s like a progress report. Except not much like. Maybe I should call this one a status report, since there’s so little progress.

Anyway, here’s the progress so far:

I knitted Swatch #1 and 2. Swatches 1,2,3, and 14 are supposed to be knit with the same yarn and needles. The only difference is in the stitches, so you can compare them and see “why is stockinette different from garter?” Swatches 1 and 2 are garter and stockinette, respectively.

Swatch #1: Garter Stitch

Swatch #2: Stockinette Stitch

[Please ignore how crappy Swatch #2 looks-- neither one has been blocked yet.]

Now, allow me to ramble about what has been going on with these two swatches.

First, I started Swatch 1 and knit the ribbing. I noticed something that I had noticed on the sweater I made, the sweater I failed to make, the socks I was knitting at the moment– in fact, everything I make that isn’t in lace gauge. I have “bumps” or ridges in the back of my stockinette. In other words, when I try to knit a flat piece of knitting, there are ridges in the back:

Rrrruffles have rrrridges!

I learned, from reading about tension problems in the many useful resources on the TKGA web site, that knitting is not supposed to have those ridges. I was shocked. I thought they were decorative. I thought they were why people complain about purls. I thought…

Well, anyway. Never mind what I thought. Knitterly denial is a powerful thing.

The problem was, the TKGA web site discussed lots of ways to fix your stockinette, assuming your purls were looser than your knits. Looser? I looked at my stitches. Only if being looser meant they were smaller, tighter and more cramped looking. In some places, my purl stitches disappear they’re so much tighter than the knits.

I knew I was in trouble.

I turned to Ravelry. And here, let me state, again, that there’s no resource in the world that’s been as helpful to me as Ravelry. I’m going to have to figure out how to cite Rox on Ravelry in my references when I do them, because she’s the one who led me to this information:

Until a week ago, I was a Combination knitter. This means, in essence, that although I knit normally for an English-style knitter, I wrap my purls around the needle backwards, and this means that not only don’t they have enough yarn to form an even tension with the knits, but they’re also a bit twisted from the knits.

Who knew?

Well, probably people in my knitting group, but when you crank out projects anyway, nobody cares about how you did it. The truth is, in knitting, this little difference doesn’t mean all that much (if you swatch correctly, you will adjust for tension problems as you knit your garment to fit– this is why my sweater fits even though it has uneven tension). Except in two places: the depth of my heart, and the TKGA Master Knitting program.

So for the last week or so, I’ve been wrapping the purls the other way. Two things happened when I did this. First, I found it very hard to switch. I mean, you try doing something so much it becomes muscle memory, and then change it!

Second, magically, my purls had the same tension as my knits.

Glory hallelujah!

Anyway, I’m going to re-do my Swatch 1, because I also went back and re-read the directions. As it turns out, I didn’t weave the ends in correctly, so I want to re-do the swatch with the correct weaving-in.