Monday, March 26, 2012

Are you an innie or an outie?

I am still working on my scarf for the Knitting Blooms March Madness Challenge. The scarf is about 22 inches long (unblocked) and I still have 60 grams of yarn left in ball so I am less than halfway through the yarn and I have until Friday night to finish it. I really would like to finish this KAL on time but I don't know if I will. I was hoping to spend a lot of time knitting on the scarf while I was on vacation but that didn't happen. I took my knitting with me but failed to knit even one stitch and I'm okay with that.

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I think the feather and fan stitch was a good choice for this yarn. I haven't decided if I am going to do a hard block on the scarf to open the stitch up as much as possible or if I'm just going to let it dry naturally which will emphasize the ridges. I'm leaning toward the ridges. You can find all the scarf details on my Ravelry project page.

Now that I've talked a bit about the project, I'll get to the point of this post. When you wind your yarn into a center-pull cake, do you pull the yarn from the center (innie) or pull the yarn from the outside of the cake (outie). Normally, I pull from the center but for some reason I decided to pull from the outside when I started knitting on this project. Here's the thing...it doesn't feel like I am making any sort of progress when I look at the ball of yarn.

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I started off with 108 grams and the ball is down to 60 grams but it just doesn't seem to be smaller. I know that if I put this ball next to a 100 gram ball it will look smaller but without a point of reference, it seems like I am knitting and knitting and knitting and the ball isn't getting any smaller. I had no idea how much I relied on visual cues to feel a sense of knitting accomplishment. I know the scarf is getting longer but unless I start using stitch markers to track my progress I won't be getting visual feedback every time I knit because it takes several knitting sessions before the scarfs looks longer.

However, there are some definite pluses to being an outie. I haven't had the yarn tangle at all which happens occasionally when I use the yarn from the middle. Also, when the project is finished, any leftover yarn is will still be in a nice yarn cake instead of being collapsed into a pile that has to be wound into a ball.

So, my fellow knitters, are you an innie or an outie? Do you have a definite opinion one way or the other? Shout it out in the comments.

3 comments:

  1. OUTIE!! all the way! I like to end up with a neat little cake of yarn vs. some collapsed mess when I finish my project. Then, I can throw that neat little ball into my pile fo knitting my blankie!

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  2. I used to be an outie because I like the nice neat little cake/ball at the end. But I started to worry that since I wind like a wild woman that I might be winding my yarn too tight and that I should pull from the center to release any tension on the yarn, allowing it to plump back to it's normal state as quickly as possible. I think this makes me a nut job, but there you have it. I'm a converted innie :-)

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