I finished a garment! Ok, yes, it was a pair of socks, but they fit! In addition I learned many things, such as I don’t like knitting socks top down, and I’m not a fan of a heel flap construction. I should probably use smaller needles, too.

What I did like about this project is knitting both socks at once with two circular knitting needle sets. When I was done knitting one sock, I was also done with both socks. No trying to make a second match! Two needle sets were quite fiddly with this pattern and method, but I have hopes for the next pattern that uses a toe up method!

I know other people really like the top down method, and enjoy double pointed needles. I’m glad we are all different and that there are people out there sharing their preferred methods.

So usually I am not a proponent of ripping out yarn work. If an item passes the 10 second rule (someone who is not an expert can’t find the mistake in under 10 seconds) it’s fine. I’ve put dozens of hours into knitting a fingering weight cardigan, finally getting it to the point it could be tried on. The intended target doesn’t like it. Honestly, I don’t either. The colors look fabulous in the skein, but I really dislike color pooling in knitting, and this one is particularly jarring.

So I had a choice: put a couple more dozen hours into an ugly item no one will ever wear, or rip it out and make socks that everyone will wear. Frog it time. (Rip it, rip it, rip it.)

I say “frog it” flippantly, but it is a heavy duty to destroy your own work, even when the intension is to make anew. To cushion the heartache, I shot some video of the deconstruction and posted YouTube shorts. It did provide some catharsis.

Winding it back into a cake will help the kinks from knitting straighten out too.

I decided to move my cardigan knitting project to be a car waiting project. When school is going, I regularly carve out an hour of my day to yarn works while waiting for pick up. It is a time that I am uninterrupted by tasks that cause me to get up and move away from the knitting, such as letting animals outside, or getting distracted by another craft. I enjoy listening to an audio book and work away. That is all this cardigan needs, is some regular focused time. I might get it done before spring.

There are many ways of doing most things. Finding what works best for you is usually a series of trials and errors. I have been knitting with fingering weight yarn the same way I knit with thicker yarn, but have been having trouble keeping even tension because the thinner yarn slips through my fingers more. I tried wrapping it three times around my pinkie, but it had more tendency to bind. I recently tried a new finger wrapping method, going clockwise around my pinkie, the counterclockwise around my ring finger. Bingo. I have more control of the yarn without binding or excessive yarn drop.

This little change helped increase my knitting speed as well as reduced frustration with what seemed to be uncooperative yarn.