The Amazing Lace - Challenge #1: Meet the Team

Call me crazy, but I joined yet another KAL. This one's THE AMAZING LACE. OK - so I have now entered the world of reality knitting...and no, I have never even watched The Amazing Race on TV. For reality TV I watch American Idol. (Go Taylor!!).

In this KAL, we are presented with challenges every two weeks. I know it will be tough & back-breaking, but I'm up for the challenge. I will be making the Icarus Shawl (yes, I also belong to the Icarus Shawl KAL, among others). The pattern is from the Summer 2006 issue of Interweave Knits, by Miriam Felton.


Our first challenge is to introduce ourselves.

There's me, Tammy, and ---

---my teammate, Autumn, a finicky red head. She hails from the Alpaca Cloud Provence of KnitPicks County. I hope I can keep her spirits in check. She can be pretty feisty at times. Oh well, I guess that's the nature of red heads. At least I can use that to my advantage. She'll be the one pushing our team to keep on going.


She even has her own name tag, so I guess that makes her an official entrant, the VIP, so to speak. The one in charge. The head honcho. The big cheese. You get the picture... She has the personality traits to keep us ahead of the game. I don't even have a name tag. Go figure...



Autumn's ready to travel the world in our adventure together. I'm looking forward to going where no knitter has gone before. Of course, we're going to need some form of transportation, some way to take us on our journey.




And this is it - our official means of transportation (we have plenty of spares in case of a breakdown, or worse yet, if we can no longer afford gas).





And then, of course, we have our Amazing Lace Board of Directors who will be monitoring our progress.

Our Announcer - Scooter

Our Chaperone - Cleo

Our TroubleMaker - Jazz-Purr

READY. SET. GO!

Kuba-NO // Icarus-YES

Kuba is an EXTREMELY SLOW (& BORING) KNIT! It's taking a huge effort just to pull it out of the knitting bag and knit a couple rows each day. I am determined to finish it -- I just don't know when. I've completed all of the triangles, have joined them and am now up to round 14. I probably have about 9 more inches to go before I spruce things up with a stripe of color, so getting excited about this knit is still quite a ways away.

To top off the boredom, there will be no pictures posted today (or for a while). DH took my camera with him on a business trip.

On the more positive front, I found a new shawl I'd love to knit. It's the Icarus Shawl from the Summer 2006 issue of Interweave Knits & I just sent an eMail to join this KAL for it. I think I'll make it out of KnitPicks Alpaca Cloud in Autumn.

Kuba Redux

Well I had to take a trip to the frog pond. The way my M1's were looking on Kuba was really bothering me. They were making a big hole where the increase was. I thought this may have been the way it was supposed to look, but I slowly began to realize that it should not look that way. The light bulb finally went off. I was making the M1 wrong. I thought I had been lifting the bar from front to back, but in fact, I actually was not. What I would do was lift the bar with the right needle (going front to back) and then place it on the left, but what this essentially ended up doing was making the left go from back to front. And even though I then knitted through the back loop, I was actually "untwisting" the increased stitch, leaving the hole.

So -- I ripppppped out all of my work and have now started over, knitting the M1's correctly this time. I've only finished the first two small triangles so I have a ways to go before I get back to where I was before I had ripped - at least 2 weeks worth of work. That's OK, though. I'm not up against any deadlines and I find knitting quite relaxing so having to do a "do over" suits me just fine.

The way I discovered my actual error was when I tried experimenting with my first toe-up sock. (By the way, the Turkish Cast-On is great for this). I was beginning the toe increases, using my M1 method and noticed the holes here, as well. I decided to take a closer look at what I was actually doing, and VOILA! the light bulb went off. I ripped out the toes (yes, toes as in more than one: I'm a 2 socks at once person) but have not restarted the toe-up socks. I'm not sure I like this method, although it may be that I am too used to the cuff-down method. Once I make some headway again on Kuba, I may try the toe-ups again.