croak, croak

Can you hear the frogs? I think they migrated from my back garden pond to my mosaic socks. I realised I had made a mistake on half of one dpns. I waited till good early morning light this morning to unpick because the purple stitches were very dark, but found I was not really knowing where I was going.

So I ripped out about eight rows, back to where there were two rows of the dark purple together. It was much easier to see. Picked up all the sixty stitches and realised I still had them arranged wrongly on needles, etc etc. I carefully picked back another row, re-knitted it and am now good to go.

It's also easier to pick up the place from the pattern which is both written out and charted. The mosaic knitting looks more difficult than it is. Each pattern set consists of two rows. The first of these starts with the main colour for that row. Some stitches are slipped from the previous row and these will be in the second colour. The next row is exactly the same. Then colours and pattern arrangement are altered for the next two rows and so on. Because of the slipping, there is no stranding of the extra colour across the back of the fabric. Clear as mud??

People commented on my speed in the first pair. I'm not really a quick knitter, but decided I would spend all the holiday Monday knitting. Well, I did. Perhaps not quite all, but a good proportion of it. So that got me off to a good start. The pattern was easy. I had the stitches arranged with each set of fifteen on a separate needle. This cut down checking I was still OK. Also eliminated the need for a marker anywhere. I find markers very useful, but I have to stop knitting rhythm to move them from one needle to next. I made sure I did the ten full rows of the pattern each time before stopping. That never seemed to take very long, so I often started another set. Pattern is only on instep of foot, so that halved pattern knitting.