You Can't Get There from Here: A Rant

I sat down the other night to start knitting my scarf for the ISE -- the one on which I had already spent four and a half hours stringing 1,680 beads onto a skinny little piece of string. It's from a kit purchased at my LYS. The yarn and the beads were packaged together with a pattern pamphlet entitled "6 Scarves and a Shawl." It's put out by a Canadian company, so I was quite happy to find something with local flavour.

Before I bought it, I opened up the package to see what the patterns were like, etc. Most of them had fringe on the ends, which I thought looked kind of ratty, but one of them, the Charlotte, had beaded tassels instead. I thought that was a nice touch and would be something a little different, so that's the one that I planned on making.

According to the pattern, you first make a tassel for each end, and then you just knit away on the scarf until you run out of beads or yarn, attach the tassels to the ends and you're done. Very cool. After a bit of futzing around to figure out how to get the beads to lay nicely in the knitting, I was well on my way.

For each tassel, you knit a small band 10 stitches wide, with beads. You then make two loops in each stitch, with 70 beads in each loop. These loops then dangle and jangle and are generally very snazzy.

Knitting, beading, tasselling, looping -- much fun ensued. Until I finished stitch number 8, at which point I casually remarked to myself, "Hmm, this tassel feels kind of, well, heavy." I looked over at my remaining beads and, not so casually, commenced to curse. Let's see: 8 stitches with two loops each is 16 loops, each with 70 beads, means I've used 1120 beads, plus the ones in the band. Two more loops to go just on this tassel, which is another 280 beads, so over 1,400 beads in this one tassel. That leaves less than ... 280 ... beads for the other tassel and the entire scarf.

I must have done something wrong. I re-read the directions. Nope, I did it right. I look again at the remaining beads. Nope, they didn't magically reproduce while I was doing the math. I curse some more. I flip through the pamphlet looking for clues. And I found one. Page 6 of the pamphlet has a materials list. Most of the patterns call for 100 grams of #6 beads. My friend Charlotte? She needs 50 grams of #6 beads and 50 grams of #10 beads. Nowhere in the pattern directions does it mention different sizes of beads.

Arrrrgggh

and also

grrrrrrrr.


Memo to Swallow Hill Creations Ltd.: If you package up a kit entitled "6 Scarves and a Shawl," you should include in the kit a note such as, "This kit contains the material required to make pattern A, B or C. If you wish to make patterns D, E, F or G, you will have to buy additional materials; please refer to materials list." If you were to do so, a gullible knitter would not purchase your kit and blithely attempt to make Pattern D. Also, upon a further and more careful perusal of your patterns, the second pattern in the booklet is Exactly the Same as the first pattern, but six stitches narrower. I don't think you can legitimately call that a separate pattern.

I do not have for you a picture of one humongous and heavy -- and rather expensive -- tassel. I ripped it so fast even my head spun. I again poured over the information I had for my swap partner. Even though she is in what I would consider to be a warmer climate, she has a lot of Very Nice wooly-type yarns. No evidence of lace or froufrou. Perhaps my first inclination of cuddly cables was in order after all. Enter Plan B.



In the Other News Department: The Knitters Tea Swap 3 -- go sign up!!

A Question: I've been hoping that Blogger would remedy the lack of return address on comments. It was there before, but in the new Blogger it isn't. It takes way too long to click around trying to find an address to reply, so I kind of gave up, but I like replying to comments. Are those of you who use Haloscan able to easily respond?