I can’t believe I did this
Since I don't have any knitting pics for this post, here's a recent photo I took at a local park (click to see it bigger)
The Tweed Vest is no more. That’s right, it’s gone. You probably want to know what happened, right? Remember that I was working it in the round with a steek at the front center. Well, even though I knew I shouldn’t do it, I screwed up by cutting my steek early so I could try it on. After cutting the steek I decided I didn’t like what I had done in the waist area. Since you can’t reuse the yarn after cutting the steek, I’m basically screwed with this project. Sad me. I love this yarn, and especially this color. Might have to buy more and try again, but for now I’m done with it. I’m back to working on the new kids’ cardigan (it doesn’t have a name yet). I finished the yoke, cut the steek, and have one button band done. This project almost got frogged too though, because I wasn’t paying attention when I went to weave in ends where I had joined new yarn — I somehow unknitted more stitches, leaving me with a hole about 3 stitches and 3 rows wide, right on the front of the cardi. Now, I have no problem weaving in ends normally, but when it’s a dark color yarn and there are multiple rows missing…then I have a problem. It took me over an hour of intense concentration under my Ott light to get it repaired. It’s not perfect, but good enough for now. I ended up duplicate stitching over a couple of stitches anyway to make it look more even. I hate that I have such difficulty with that stuff!
I don’t know what I did to cause all this bad knitting karma lately. My Xerox Phaser 8560, the printer that I use to print all my pattern orders, has major problems. The blue ink jets are all clogged up and it won’t clean itself with the self-cleaning procedure. So I’m in the unbelievable position of hoping I don’t get any orders for the next week or so…or at least that I only get small orders that I can print on my little HP Deskjet. Of course I didn’t buy a service contract from Xerox (those things are like umbrellas…if you have one you won’t need it, and if you don’t have one you do need it), so I’m at the mercy of Media Sciences, the manufacturer of the compatible ink I’ve been using. I’m told they’re very good about paying for repairs if their ink is shown to be the cause of the problem. They made me mail them a couple pages from the printer so they can analyze it in their lab to make sure it’s their ink before they will consider authorizing a repair (very CSI, don’t you think?). So allowing 2 days for the mail, then 2 days for the lab tests, we’re looking at the middle of next week before I even hear back from them, and then probably a few days before I can get anyone scheduled to come look at it. And maybe more time if they have to order a new print head or some other part. I suppose most shops would be understanding if I couldn’t ship their orders for a week or so, but I usually like to ship within a day or two, so I hope this gets resolved sooner rather than later.
Meanwhile, I’m going back through my records trying to calculate a better estimate of how much it really costs me to print my patterns on this printer. It seems that it wastes a LOT of ink, which is disappointing considering how darn expensive the ink is. And one of the reasons I bought the printer was that I liked the supposedly lower environmental impact from not having to use those plastic ink cartridges. Ironic, huh? The environment wins, my wallet loses. I suppose Al Gore would be proud of me though….and that’s something, isn’t it?
