Frustrations with Decreases

So I think the increases in swatch 6 are going to be okay - well hopefully. Need to think about it some more.

I decided to move onto the decrease swatches - 7, 8, and 9. K2tog is easy enough, but ssk is supposed to match it. My experience is that it clearly does not match at all. The leaning top stitch is looser than it ought to be. As you can see in the picture to the right, the two sides do not match at all. I chatted on some ravelry discussion boards and got the advice to try Cat Bordhi's YouTube video called Slim and Trim SSK to get some advice. I have not tried it yet, but it looks promising.


I should not have plunged ahead, but I started the eyelet pattern swatches as well - here is swatch 11. There is an SSK in every row, which is clearly not going to be tight enough. I am not sure that Cat Bordhi's technique is going to work so well in lace, so I will have to find another option to tighten things up. Clearly I need to figure it out before I start on swatch 12 - which also has SSK in every row. I suppose that things will look better after blocking, but it is hard to tell. I should decide which swatches I am satisfied with and go ahead to block them. Then I could feel some sense of completion.

I tried to design a cable pattern from swatch 15 and it was fine enough, except that trying to get it to come out the right length and symmetrical is trickier than you might imagine.

I did other swatches in between - swatch 8 with skp and ksp, swatch 10 with yo, swatch 13 with an ordinary 2x2 cable. Not sure how ksp and skp are supposed to look - probably tighter than mine are. Really gotta weave in ends and block some things. Had to set up a notebook with page protectors and some simple labels, as the swatches are starting to look alike. Too many to keep track of easily.

I went to a large bookstore in Fort Wayne and bought two basic knitting books that ought to be quite valuable. Have not had to time to careful explore them yet.

swatch 10 - yarnovers