The Next Generation

Last weekend, my Aunt June called to let me know that she had become a great-grandmother this summer. My oldest cousin's oldest daughter had a baby daughter at the end of June, Whitney Lynne. For those of you keeping score at home, she's my first cousin, twice removed. It struck me that she would have been my grandfather' first geat-great grandchild, born in what would have been his 100th year.

So, inspired by Julia's lovely example, I decided to knit Whitney a little something to welcome her into the world. I'm making Samantha in the 6 month size -- hopefully useful for the winter. But after consultation with some fellow knitters and in consideration of our mild winters down this way, I decided to knit this out of cotton -- Dale Stork, to be precise.

I'm having issues. First of all, it's been a long time since I've knit with cotton. Unlike warm, comforting and forgiving wool, it's cool, robotic and isn't interesting in protecting your feelings. But, I'm committed to making this washable and wearable as long as possible, so cotton it is.

As I was working, I noticed something that I first noticed last fall while working on the Cobra Sweater. Every once in a while, I do something weird while knitting stockinette. I think it happens on the wrong side as I'm purling across, and I think I'm purling into the stitch below. Perhaps one of my experienced readers can let me know? It's not as noticeable in wool -- in wool, you can feel it more than you can see it. But in cotton, boy can you see it! A weird little bump. Here's an example to the left. As I got back to knitting this morning, I saw many of these. I'm talking dozens. How did I miss this yesterday? I laddered down and fixed a few, but then I started inspecting more closely, and decided to just frog it back to the bottom.

What you see in the first picture is my progress after hours and hours of work. Sigh. I'm going to be more mindful of my purling on this from now on to try and avoid this in the future.

Postscript (8:37pm): It appears I was knitting, not purling, into the row below. To keep gauge, I've been knitting very tightly. So tightly, in fact, that I can't see the bar across the bottom of the stitch -- it's hiding behind the needle, making it quite easy to knit into the stitch below. Now that I know what to look for, things are going much better.