The Art of Knitting Badly

Here’s the best Bad Knitting mistake you could ever make:  using two different needles.  Yep, that’s me.  Can’t believe I did that!  I must have been grovelling for needles in the dark:  one was 4mm, the other 3 ¾.  Not too hard to mix up size-wise, but golly, you’d think I’d notice the numbers were different. 

Since I’ve embarked on an exercise guaranteed to be filled with mistakes, it only seems appropriate to begin with the wrong needles.  I’ve given up the banana jersey for now (FAR too hot to be knitting a winter jersey)  I really wanted to try out the fantastic Gedifra Fiorista I got on sale at John Lewis.  It makes its own stripes, but they are not perfect self-striping stripes...more like someone threw several cans of paint across the canvas and ran them into one another.  Looks utterly gorgeous.  (Several balls feature in the header photograph.)

I thought I’d go with every knitting mistake in the book:

• ·         Using the wrong wool for a pattern
• ·         Using the wrong needles for the wool*
• ·         Doing bad knitting maths on a tension square
• ·         Knowing there isn’t enough wool anyway
• ·         Ignoring the shaping

I will no doubt end up with a work of art.

(*)  The yarn information says to use 6mm.  Previous experience with Gedifra is that they use US needle sizes.  So when it says “6” (and nothing else), I have to presume they mean 4mm.  Which doesn’t explain why my tension square was so wildly off – it came up rather small, which is odd because I don’t knit that tightly.  A website selling Gedifra says to use 6mm.  I tried that too but it seemed hopelessly wrong. 

PS  the bolero from hell?  I strongly suspect I’m going to pull it all out and do something else.  Will have to build up the courage for that one.