Monday 31 December 2012

The Epic Gauge Failure and Happy 2013!

Happy new year, one and all! May all your wishes come true and all that jazz. Me, I'll stick to knitting weird and wonky projects. Here's one good example:

As my mother-in-law-to-be was kind enough to add a lovely ball of multicoloured Drops Big Delight in my knitting first aid kit, I pondered what to do with it. It is so colourful that maybe I wouldn't wear it as a hat. And being 100% wool it also seemed a bit itchy for wristwarmers. So, socks!

Yummy colours
I found the pattern from the yarn manufacturer's site. The instructions suggested using 4,5 mm needles, but as I only had 5 and 6 mm, I knitted a gauge (tension, tiheys) swatch with the 5 mm first. Hmm, 10 sts on 5 cm means 20 sts on 10 cm, the instructions wanted 18. What, I need bigger needles? Tryout #2 with 6 mm needles: 9 sts on 5 cm means 18 sts on 10 cm. Perfect!

But here's where the perfect ends: after casting on the required 48 sts for size 38/40 and knitting the 3n 3p rib (mental note: looks bad, don't do this again) for a couple of cms, the sock looked like it was meant for a giant. WTF?! What went wrong, help? How was my knitting suddenly so different than in the gauge swatch? Ripping it all I started again with the 5 mm needles and hoped for a miracle. A minor improvement, yes, but I'm pretty sure that the socks will still be too big for me. Well, colourful socks for the boyfriend! Just need to get some elastic cord to get those ribbings to stay in form.

Also the fuzziest yarn ever
Still huge
 But seriously? What do you think went wrong here? Now I'm scared of messing up all my future projects by counting the gauge wrong....

Yarn: Drops Big Delight
Needles: 5 mm
Mood: WTF?!

With love, Lilje

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