“…although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable…”

“…solutions are not.”

I have begun knitting the sleeves of my Peloponnese. Yay! Finally she gets round to it!

As you know, I prefer knitting in the round on circular needles. As I didn’t have any short needles, I had to buy a new set. Blah de blah.

When I started knitting, however, I realised I wanted to knit long sleeves (not three-quarter length as described in the pattern) and so would have to knit the smallest size to fit my wrist. Can you guess what’s coming next? My needle was obviously too big. I needed to use double pointed needles. And I didn’t have the right size…

I could have cried. I had two DPNs in the right size, and a bunch that were a size up. So I decided that would have to do.

It was really fiddly doing the pattern over DPNs of varying sizes, but I got through it. Now I’m going round and round slowly with my increases and it’s going well.

I have run into a couple of issues though…

El Snappo
Turns out using hand-me-down plastic needles isn’t always smooth sailing. As I mentioned, I have been using two 3.75mm needles and two 4.00mm needles, which brings its own special kind of joy, but yesterday I also managed to snap one (luckily one of the bigger ones) in half! As much as I’d like to think of myself as the Incredible Hulk of the knitting world, I think we can blame the perishing plastic DPNs. RIP.

Ladderinos
The reason I dislike using DPNs is that I cannot seem to avoid ladders. I try and I try, pulling my yarn as tight as I can when moving from one to another (possibly another reason for El Snappo above) and yet I still seem to create nasty ladders. I’m hoping most will come out when blocking, but this one I am particularly worried about:

Honestly, I shudder looking at that :(

Fabric yuck
Finally, not DPN related, but I still dislike the feel of the wool and of the resulting fabric. It’s horrible knowing I’m going to so much effort for a jumper that’s already pilling, but I really want to see how this jumper comes out. It’s a big step forward for me so there’s bound to be numerous errors and I will have to reknit it again at some point anyway, so I think it’ worth continuing and just using different wool next time. Knowing my luck if I stopped halfway and switched wool I would run into a completely different issue when I got to the yoke anyway…

*Quote from Isaac Asimov