Manos del Uruguay Archives - Catherine Gowthorpe

Smug post about knitting

I wrote a blog post on 17th February about the trouble I was having with my knitting… and said I’d write a smug post about it if I ever got it finished. Well, ta da! It is finished. If you recall, the item in question is a cowl, or snood, made out of Manos del Uruguay Lace, a beautiful yarn. The trouble was in casting on exactly the right number of stitches (v difficult), avoiding the Mobius strip problem I described in the earlier post, and avoiding mistakes in the pattern. It was just so difficult. Even once I’d cast on the correct 240 stitches and then got it straight, the pattern was so complicated and demanded so much attention that I ended up making lots of mistakes and having to take the knitting back to correct them. It’s a 20-line pattern, repeated 11 times, so there was plenty of scope, and I was still making errors right up until the last line. Still, I eventually got there. So here’s a photo of the finished object:

And another showing the pattern close up. It’s really pretty, but a massive pain in the neck.

So, definitely no more knitting for the time being. I’ve had enough. I shall get back to what I should have been doing in the first place, which is stitching. More on that in due course.

Mobius strip problem

How can you have a Mobius strip problem with your knitting? Well, gather round and I’ll explain… At the K&S show at Alexandra Palace I bought a couple of hanks of a very beautiful yarn called ‘Manos del Uruguay Lace‘. It’s expensive, but lovely, made of silk, baby alpaca and cashmere, and I started to make a very complicated, lacy, cowl on a fine circular needle. It has 240 stitches, and you have to cast on exactly the right number or the pattern doesn’t work…. as I discovered when I realised too late that I’d cast on 242 stitches. I’m a patient soul, so I unravelled it and started again. This time I had the correct number of stitches, and I got as far as line 15 in the 20-line pattern, concentrating very hard. It wasn’t till I picked it up this morning, though, that I realised I had a Mobius strip issue with it. Because it’s knitted on a circular needle, you have to make sure that the knitting goes around in an even circle and is not twisted. Mine, however, did not – I’d made an error right back at the beginning when I started knitting row 1 and it has a twist in it as in the illustration here.

I gnashed my teeth and cursed a bit, but there’s nothing to do except pull it out and start again. Which is what I’ve done. Maybe third time lucky?

PS I’m using colour 7310 Orla. If I ever get this finished I’ll take a photo of it and write a smug post about it. But this won’t be for a good long while.