My Knitpicks order for Starsky arrived this morning. I wasn't going to actually place the order until my birthday since I'm using my mom's gift to pay for it but I was drunk and I didn't know what I was doing! Okay, I was impatient. But I could have just as easily been drunk. Don't judge me.

Anyway, the yarn is here so I swatched it up. I can't get row gauge. The pattern calls for 16 stitches and 18 rows to 4 inches and I can't get any closer than 16/22. I'm getting a full row per inch more than I should but to be honest, I don't see how you could. If anyone can achieve 16/18 with Knitpicks Sierra I wanna know about it! It's not that big a deal, I'll just work to my own row gauge and slightly alter the sleeve caps to fit. I still haven't decided on which size to knit, nor whether or not I want waist shaping.

The needles I need for Starsky are in the baby blanket right now (I pulled them out to swatch) and that's making me knit a little bit faster. The blanket seemed to show no progress no matter how much I knit until this afternoon; now it's suddenly so big! I've got about a third left to knit before blocking and a crochet edging. It's just a simple basketweave but it's so, so pretty. I want to make a bigger one as a throw for my living room.

I also spent some time working on Durrow. I read about Ken's neckline being too big, looked at what I had so far and realized that the neckline would be too wide for Alex, too. As yet I've only knit the back and one sleeve, so I ripped the back down to the underarm bind-off, calculated an appropriate raglan shaping and reknit from there. I must have used the wrong needle because it looked like shit. Rip. Reknit. Wrong needle again. Rip. Reknit. Fuck. Anyway, now I'm pissed off so I shoved it back in its bag and I'll give it another try tomorrow. I can't believe I couldn't remember what needle I was using. I've got to get better at keeping notes.

As I've mentioned before, I had to add an extra repeat of Chart B to my sleeve in order to get the cable pattern to reach high enough up on the shoulder. I determined that while my stitch gauge is pretty much correct, my row gauge was a little bit tighter than 6 rows per inch. As it turned out, that was the only way I would have been able to achieve the correct number of increases over a span of 18 inches. Had my row gauge been correct, I should have been increasing every 6th row instead of every 8th like the pattern says. From my email to Jodi:

Now after looking at it and thinking about it, it's obvious my row gauge was way off, and that ended up being a good thing because when I did some math this morning, my calculations said I would only have been able to increase a total of 11 times before hitting 18". This is what I figured, and I'm not confident about my calculations at all, so take it with a grain of salt:

Row gauge = 24/4" or 6 rows/1"
18" of sleeve = 108 rows
Begin sleeve increases at 4" from cast-on, or on 24th row.
84 rows remaining to complete 12 more increases every 8th row
84 / 8 = 10.5 increases possible

I managed to make all of my increases because I ended up knitting more rows to get the same length, and as a result the correct number of rows of cabling take up too little length, causing the end of chart C to be positioned too low on the upper arm. But when working at the correct gauge I think the increases should be spaced every 6th row to fit them all in before you hit the underam bind-off with a couple of rows to spare at the end.

My conclusion is that if you are achieving the correct gauge, for the first two sizes of Durrow the sleeve increases should actually be placed every 6th row. 12 further increases at this interval should leave you with 12 or so rows to work even at the end before beginning the shaping at underarm.

I haven't made any new progress on Durrow, but here's a crappy picture of the sleeve cabling. I tried to get a wider shot of the sleeve so you could see the entire cable but I didn't have enough light.