Oh Fiddlesticks...

...I am never going to get this finished in time so I am going to abort the project.

Sometimes - even I can tell (by the pure fact of my avoidance behaviour) that something is just not going to happen. This is one of those projects. It was a garter for my sister who gets married on Saturday. However, even if I flogged myself half to death with this pattern today and paid through my nose for an international courier, it is not certain that it would reach her in time.

I am sad about that but I am going to rip it out and place the yarn aside for a little while. The yarn, Fiddlesticks Zephyr, is allocated to my sister in my head. So I will make her something else with it - that way, she will get better use of my gift over time.

I have been sitting here, staring at the garter this afternoon trying to work out why this project did not happen for me. I have decided that it is a mix of little irritations, no one single thing, that added up to a complete stop, just at the point when I needed to be full steam ahead:

Pattern
The pattern is fairly straightforward and I have seen some great project results on Ravelry (Eloping, Knitty Summer 2008). Yet I am not in love with it. I am put off by the fact that my brain found it difficult to get into the swing of the repeats.

At the very start, I was caught out by a YO before a P2tog stitch. I usually complete my YOs as a YF manouvere. Naturally, this doesn't work when the next stitch is a purl! So I had to change do a full YO which, because I do not do them that way usually, I kept stumbling over. (This is where I find out that I have been doing YOs wrong for 5 years.)

After a couple of repeats, I decided to redo the lace chart, as I found the one in the pattern unnecessarily complicated. Once I had assigned a symbol to each stitch that had the same meaning whichever row I was on, I found it much easier to settle into working rhythm.

Mind you, I still found that I couldn't put my crib sheet aside completely though as the pattern has stuff happening on every row - my memory must be completely shot!

All of the above meant that I couldn't work on this with anyone else around. - as soon as I lost concentration, e.g. the Fella asking me if I'd like a cup of tea, I'd lose where I was. Ngg.

Needles
I did not like the way that the yarn worked with my long metal straights. Somehow, the yarn was too slippy for them. Also, as my last project was on sock needles, I found them a bit heavy, cold and awkward to work with.

So I swapped over to the only other 3.25mm wood needles that I had: my Knit Picks Harmony sock needles. I got better grip on the yarn with these needles but I found them a bit too short and fiddly to work a flat pattern with easily.

So with my sincere apologies to my sister, I am going to put this project failure down to a combination of the pattern, yarn, needles and my head at the moment.

For now, until things have settled down a bit, I think that I need to stick with some very simple and easy knitting?