Knitting Olympics recap

I had grand dreams of blogging every day during the Winter Olympics about my Knitting Olympics project. However, it came down to trying to make my daily deadline or blogging and what would be the point of blogging it if I wasn't actually knitting it?

(This had the added advantage of not posting some rants about the olympics coverage and the attitudes of some online to certain athletes.)

I'm not very good at swatching (or knitting a tension square - there isn't really a verb in Australian/British knitting English, although I think that technically swatching is not a word either, rather one knits a swatch). I find it hard to measure - everytime I get a different measurement and it doesn't help when they say "slightly stretched" - define slightly?. That is one reason I try to avoid swatching. I usually just rely on the stretchiness of knitted fabric and use the guage, yarn thickness and needle size mentioned in the pattern.

If one or more of these is going to change (e.g. needle size or yarn thickness), I normally just pick the next size up and hope for the best. However, for this jumper where I was using yarn and (after trying out different sizes) a needle size different from the pattern, I swatched,



tried to work out my guage and then considering the fact that Clem's width dimensions are even smaller than the smallest size in the pattern(which surprised me as whilst Clem isn't fat, he isn't a stick) did some dodgy maths and decided to knit something slightly bigger than the biggest size. (I wanted to make some other modifications to the pattern, so it was easier to just adjust it slightly up.)

This is very risky because what if I ended up with a jumper that was too small? As I was resolute that this was Clem's jumper in his mum's yarn, then any size failure would mean complete reknitting. Praise God, all tries on have fit him!

I did more dodgy maths trying to work out how fast I had to knit each day. My bad maths (and English) went something like this. There are 17ish days of the Winter Olympics (from flame lighting to flame extinguishment). I estimate that the front is about 1/3rd of the whole project, back is 1/3rd and the two sleeves together are 1/3rd with a little bit of time (a day or so?) for seeming, weaving in ends and knitting the neck. So lets say 10 days for the front and back, 5 days for the sleeves and 2 days for the seeming etc. As I was planning to knit in the round, I therefore figured that the front and back after splitting for the armholes should take about 1 day each and so I had 8 days to knit the front and back in the round up to the armholes. (I wont try and explain where the maths on this is wrong but it involves knitting the front and back after the armholes at about twice the speed of the body up till then.) It took me 9 days to knit up to the armholes. It took me 3.5 days to knit the rest of the body.



I still lived under the illusion that I could knit the sleeves in two days each and then rush the body and finish by the deadline. Perhaps I could have, if I didn't have to work or go about everyday life. However, the sleeves which (due to my inability to find the right sized DPNs) were knit on two large circs (a new technique for me), seemed to drag on and on and on. I think I came to the realisation part way through the final Saturday that I wasn't going to finish in time and so in many ways just gave up hope of trying (and started allowing myself to do other things).



So by the end of the Olympics, I had part of a sleeve and the body of a jumper. Whilst the jumper wasn't finished (and still isn't), and even though it stuffs up my knitting schedule, I don't think the experience was a failure - it gave me most of a jumper, I got a lot of knitting done, I got to watch a lot of Winter Olympics (which gave me a lot of pleasure) and I got to acknowledge the event that 4 years ago had made me a knitter.

[Next up - problems with the pattern - good thing I only discovered most of them once the games were over.]