A Lesson in Tension

I survived the weekend, and had an absolute blast! The LYS tour features 23 yarn stores and would you believe I made it to ALL of them!?! Here I am with a fully stamped passport!



In all I drove/rode over 550 miles, took a round trip ferry ride, and spent about 26 hours from Thurs-Sunday on the tour. I won't tell you how much money I spent, but don't worry - none of it was from the adoption fund! All of it was from my yarn budget that I've been saving up for months. Plus, as I start making creations they will go up for sale here and in my etsy site to raise money for the adoption. Win, win you see! Hehe... that's what I've been telling Dave too.

In other news, I finally finished the shipwreck shawl (will post pics after it has been blocked), AND I finished my second pair of baby socks. I'm not super happy with these socks, hence the title "A Lesson in Tension".



So... if you aren't a knitter, you should know that how tightly you knit is important. Above is a pair of socks. Each was knitted on size 3 double points, both using the Knitpicks Risata yarn in Spicy, both uses the same pattern. You'll notice that the right sock is significantly larger than the left sock. That is because my tension was looser for this sock than the last. Sigh... This also means that I get to knit a second left sock (knitted more tightly) and a second right sock (knitted more loosely) to end up with matching pairs.

I think what happened is that I was extremely stressed/overwhelmed/tense when I knit the first sock, thus my tension was super tight. After having a weekend of fun, I was super relaxed, and thus the other sock ended up much larger.

The moral of the story is to be careful about keeping consistent tension while knitting socks - or knit them both in the same time period - or knit them both at the same time on one long circular needle. ;) Take your pick.


PS... thank you for the blog prizes ladies! I really appreciate them! :)