Knitting

My latest afghan knitting project is more complicated than I thought when I first decided to knit it. In fact, I'm having a lot of problems with it. I've been knitting for years and considered myself a skilled advanced knitter; I've lost count of the sweaters, afghans, baby blankets and scarves, many with complicated patterns that I've knitted over the years, but this knitting project is giving me headache!

I planned this project when we had days and nights of hard freeze with danger of water pipes bursting. While waiting for warmer weather, I thought it would be nice to make an Aran afghan. I wanted to knit it in one piece instead of the usual 5 or 6 bands which are then sewn together. I started knitting swatches of traditional Aran stitches that I found on the internet.

Little did I know the trouble I was in for when I chose Saxon Braid as one of the designs. The Saxon Braid is a series of special stitches knitted out of sequence, creating a series of intersected crosses or X's as the design develops. Its only 24 stitches wide and 16 row repeat pattern. After I started the swatch I discovered this was not going to be ezpz.

I took me three days to knit the first row, and once I got that knitted correctly, it took another week to get past row three. I either had too many stiches left at the end of the row, or not enough to finish the pattern. I counted and recounted the stitches, unraveled what I had done and started over. I only knitted a foundation of 2 rows before starting the pattern, so starting over meant that I had to begin at the real beginning. That meant casting 24 stitches onto the needles and knitting a couple of rows then start the Saxon Braid. That took more time than trying to knit the 24 stiches correctly.

I've reached row 8 and keeping my fingers crossed. If I do a swatch without errors, I'll add Saxon Braid to my afghan.

Saxon Braid