There are so many perils in knitting, the needles are sharp and can tenderize your fingertips, you have to match the right yarn and pattern, you need to know how to sew things together properly after you finish knitting and then there is knitting with dark coloured yarns. Its peril is it is so very hard to see your output. Stitches too easily get lost in some very dark hole making it a challenge to determine if you are actually getting the results you should. Some knitters avoid darkly coloured yarns because of this challenge and yet others have found ways to work around it.
It helps to knit with dark yarn during daylight hours. Great idea during the summer when the sun stays up well past 9 pm, but not so good during the winters when it doesn't gets up before 8 am (as or before most of us leave the house to go to work) and sets about 4 pm (while most of us are still at work.) So in the winter I tend to work on brightly coloured projects for the spring and summer, and during the summer construct those dark projects for the fall and winter. It is a good way to try to get a jump on next seasons' knitting.
Other tricks of the trade to help with dark coloured yarn knitting is to use light coloured needles, so the dark stitches can clearly be seen on them. Or use a light coloured towel or pillowcase on your lap so that the background contrasts with your dark yarn. But of course the most important tool to help with dark coloured yarn knitting, or any knitting for that matter, is a good overhead light. I love the special reading lights Paul purchased a few years ago for each of us. They have an adjustable arm so I can make sure to shine that light exactly where I need it. And they have a very high beam light for those gray winter nights of Vancouver and a lower beam as the sun sets late in the summer.
Truth be told, these types of problems didn't really bother me much when I was younger, but then many things didn't bother me back then. Luckily this particular problem doesn't really require medication or exercises, just some common sense.
Blue Boy Sweater is still in process. Someone was just talking about the difficulty of trying to match yarns that come from different dye lots, now who was that? Oh, yes, it was ME. So rather than take my own advice and not try to match different yarns I knit the second sleeve on Blue Boy 4 times trying out all the different light blues I had on hand. (You'll remember I didn't have enough of the original light blue since the first time I knit it I added just one stripe instead of two.) So it took me 4, yes count them, f-o-u-r takes, before it occurred to me that the second stripe was never, never going to look right, because it was done with a different yarn! Then it occurred to me, hey I'm in control of the design so if I didn't want to I really did not have to include the stripes on the sleeves. Why it took me so long to come to that realization is hard to explain, but there it is, I'm slow in taking advice, even my own.
On the upside I'm never bored or unamused because I can constantly entertain myself with my own hardheadedness. So my project for the rest of the day is to finish that blanky-blank-blank Blue Boy. This might be one of those projects when knitting is not therapeutic, just tedious.
It helps to knit with dark yarn during daylight hours. Great idea during the summer when the sun stays up well past 9 pm, but not so good during the winters when it doesn't gets up before 8 am (as or before most of us leave the house to go to work) and sets about 4 pm (while most of us are still at work.) So in the winter I tend to work on brightly coloured projects for the spring and summer, and during the summer construct those dark projects for the fall and winter. It is a good way to try to get a jump on next seasons' knitting.
Other tricks of the trade to help with dark coloured yarn knitting is to use light coloured needles, so the dark stitches can clearly be seen on them. Or use a light coloured towel or pillowcase on your lap so that the background contrasts with your dark yarn. But of course the most important tool to help with dark coloured yarn knitting, or any knitting for that matter, is a good overhead light. I love the special reading lights Paul purchased a few years ago for each of us. They have an adjustable arm so I can make sure to shine that light exactly where I need it. And they have a very high beam light for those gray winter nights of Vancouver and a lower beam as the sun sets late in the summer.
Truth be told, these types of problems didn't really bother me much when I was younger, but then many things didn't bother me back then. Luckily this particular problem doesn't really require medication or exercises, just some common sense.
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| Perhaps how I approached knitting this week, while skydiving in my head! |
Blue Boy Sweater is still in process. Someone was just talking about the difficulty of trying to match yarns that come from different dye lots, now who was that? Oh, yes, it was ME. So rather than take my own advice and not try to match different yarns I knit the second sleeve on Blue Boy 4 times trying out all the different light blues I had on hand. (You'll remember I didn't have enough of the original light blue since the first time I knit it I added just one stripe instead of two.) So it took me 4, yes count them, f-o-u-r takes, before it occurred to me that the second stripe was never, never going to look right, because it was done with a different yarn! Then it occurred to me, hey I'm in control of the design so if I didn't want to I really did not have to include the stripes on the sleeves. Why it took me so long to come to that realization is hard to explain, but there it is, I'm slow in taking advice, even my own.
On the upside I'm never bored or unamused because I can constantly entertain myself with my own hardheadedness. So my project for the rest of the day is to finish that blanky-blank-blank Blue Boy. This might be one of those projects when knitting is not therapeutic, just tedious.
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