Kimono Sweater, Post #1

So, with my knitting history out of the way, let's move on to the present, with the current project at my fingertips. At the moment I am working on the "Kimono Styled Sweater" from KnitPicks. No, it isn't a free pattern, but I really liked it so I forked out the two bucks.

I have to say that in general I have been very pleased with KnitPicks. I was a little wary when I first came across their site - how could yarns that cheap be of respectable quality? But I couldn't argue with the prices, and I started out with little orders for little projects, and now I have ordered 3 different yarn lines in 4 total colors from them and have yet to be disappointed at all. The one thing I'll mention is that none of the yarn colors have been precisely accurate compared with either my home or work monitors' displays; they have all been somewhat... brighter, i guess, in person. Still, as long as you aren't extremely particular about your exact shade, then I highly recommend their yarns. (In a perfect world, I would never buy yarn without seeing it - and touching it - in person, but I can't always find or afford the yarn I want. I guess it just isn't a perfect world.) Everything I've bought from KnitPicks has been extremely soft and pretty agreeable to work with.

For the Kimono sweater, I'm using their Elegance yarn in Lilac. I started it 3 days ago and last night finished the first iteration (of 3) of the 24-rows of cable pattern for the 'tummy' part.

(Forgive the image. It was dark in my house when I took the picture.)

What you see is about 3, maybe 4 inches long at this point, and while on the needles it doesn't look like it will actually fit around my middle. However, I did my guage and it worked out like it was supposed to, so I'm just following the pattern and hoping for some stretch. The pattern has been... intricate. Or painstaking. Something along those lines. AND I don't believe it's written correctly, in one little sentence that turns out to be a MAJOR detail. I can't post the pattern here, of course, since it isn't a free pattern (it cost $1.99), but it tells you to repeat some rows that, at least when I tried to puzzle through it, didn't seem to be quite right. So I thought I had figured out which rows I should be repeating, instead of the ones I was told to repeat, and worked through those, and then after I took the picture above and went back to work, I realized that by following these alternate rows, I had turned my cables the wrong way. Not just on one or two cables, mind you, but for the entire row. See, where the little arrow is pointing? That should be going in the other direction. So I ripped out about a half dozen rows, and now I don't have quite as much done as you see above. Fortunately, though, I was able to pick up all my little loops again neatly enough, and this evening I will get everything back on track. I will let you know if I figure out where it was either me or the pattern who went awry at that one critical bit.

(I would have already been at this thing redoing it and reexamining the written pattern, because it's driving me crazy thinking about it... But, ahem, currently I am posting from work. And while I do get enough down time at work to mess around on the internet and update my blog, I don't think they would appreciate it if i were sitting at my desk with needles in hand. At least not on a weekday.)

So... yes. More on this later.