Decreasing is hard

Apparently wine is very useful when trying to decrease b/c I had such trouble with these swatches. Made them both in KnitPicks Shine Sport b/c the heavier yarn made it easier to watch the stitches as I was knitting as opposed to waiting til after blocking to see that they looked like crap.

Wednesday night was the left leaning swatch, all knit 2 togethers and knit 3 togethers for the most part. I unraveled this thing about six times, but finally ended up with something I was very happy with. If you look at the pic of both swatches you can see how the decreases work with the natural swoop of the pattern and it looks quite pretty.

Thursday night was the right leaning swatch, all slip slip knits and passing slipped stitches over. This I'm less than thrilled with. I'm on the right track, but obviously didn't get enough stitches decreased in time (see how much wider it is at the top than the other swatch?) But I'd hit the wall at the end of the night and opted to stop rather than get all cranky. In the end though I think this side will never be as pretty as the other, it just doesn't integrate with the lace's pattern as well as the other decreases do. I'm going to get this better, but I'm not going to sweat it. Quite frankly, no one should be looking so closely at my butt that they notice and are bothered by this. Can you tell I'm still a little annoyed about this swatch? Ah well...

Sorry this pic is a little dark - there's exactly one spot in our apartment that gets nice natural light in the morning and as anyone in NYC can tell you, it's raining today. Not too much natural light to go around.


So today I'm charting out what I did and then I'm going to knit this swatch again. Then the decreasing will all be planned and it'll be all about the yarn selections. And finding a good pattern. Oh and actually deciding where and when were getting married. That might be nice too.