I *heart* Sarah Swett

I'm a sucker for twining leaf patterns.

Yesterday, while cleaning up my room to install some new-to-me bookcases, I rediscovered my old-school scanner, which stubbornly continues to work despite years of neglect and improper storage. So I scanned a couple pages from the knitting journal I updated obsessively for, oh, about a month, sometime in 1998. The page above is all that remains of my first attempt to spin & handknit Sarah Swett's amazing sweater from the Knitting in America book-- chronicled (my attempt, that is) in more detail here (synopsis: first time spinning/dyeing, indigo didn't exactly take, yarn too thick, gauge too big, ripped it out, made a different sweater, yadda yadda).

I still couldn't get that sweater out of my head, though, and when I bought that old y knitting machine a couple eons ago, the Sarah Swett pattern was one of the first two-color swatches I knit. I punched in the pattern to the Design-A-Knit software, revved up the machine, started the carriage running across the needles (gnash! gnash! For anyone who hasn't heard a knitting machine work before, I think it's the scariest sound). Here's what happened:

See, I got through the pattern okay-- you can see the leaves, and the birds hanging out in the leaf-tops--but what are all those random little red stitches that show up, especially near the top? Was my computer (running the Design-A-Knit software) just getting overheated/running out of memory? Is it something mechanical in the knitting machine? Should I have programmed in shorter whatchamacallits (the maximum number of stitches that one yarn gets held in the back at a time)?

Yeah, I don't know either. But now you understand why I haven't exactly been in a hurry to break the machine out of its box again.