Third Time is the Charm.

After a history of much hemming and hawing, knitting and frogging, and throwing up of my hands in frustration, I have restarted and made significant progress on my arch nemesis, the minimalist cardigan.

As you may know if you have seen the pattern, the minimalist is not a difficult sweater in most senses of the word. It's a little ribbing, followed by miles and miles of moss stitch. We are not talking about dancing backwards in high heels here..(OK, in my case walking forwards in heels is hard enough, but that's just another of many sources of comedy in my life).

The tragedy of the situation is now I realize why my previous attempts were so terribly flawed.

Freaking dull pointed bamboo needles.

Oh, how I curse those freaking dull pointed bamboo needles. Give me sharp! Give me pointy! Give me more coffee! (caught that huh? OK, so I'm thirsty and I'm trying to figure out if anyone is paying attention. If you are, then its cream , no sugar. Thanks!)

Also, it took me way to long to realize that when you knit moss stitch, and the number of stitches is odd then all you have to remember is to knit the opposite stitch on the front (IE-knit all the purls and purl all the knits) and on the back, you just do the same thing (knit your knits and purl your purls). I was trying to use my row counter and keep track of what row I was on in the repeat and all that jazz, which was slowing me down significantly.

Yeah, I feel kinda dumb for not doing a bit more pattern analysis before I got trucking on it, but the difference in my speed after I stopped worrying about the rows was amazing. Like so amazing, that I now am on the first sleeve after knitting the back and both front panels. On previous attempts I only made it part of the way up the back before I would screw up the pattern or split the yarn with the dull needle point and make things messy and have to frog and frog and frog.

The KP options needles are totally making this a joy, and at this rate, I may just be polishing this off in the next week or two depending on how much time I have to roll on it. Pretty darned excited about it too. Since this will be my second sweater I have ever knit, and the first with a distinct stitch pattern, the seaming should be a pretty interesting lesson in itself. I'll be posting some progress pics over the course of the next day or two.

Have a good Tuesday Ya'll!