Knitting--Changing Colors

Well I'm up in Detroit with my boyfriend for his MC drill weekend, and I spent today lounging around the hotel room knitting, reading and looking up new recipes on FoodNetwork.com. I decided to start a different scarf for my sister--the 55-stitch across scarf I had started was too long to sit comfortably on my knitting needles, and took way too long to get across one row. The new scarf is 35-stitches across and much more managable. Since this afternoon, I've knit about three inches and I just changed colors from red to white! However, learning how to change colors was more than "just" doing it.

I spent about an hour on the internet today looking up the proper way to change colors for a striped, knit scarf. I found different advice, from tying (leaving a knot) the new color onto the old, or knitting it in for a full row and then dropping the old color, or knitting the new color in for just a stitch and then dropping the old, or not dropping the old color at all and just carrying it up a few rows until I need it again. Holy cow! How is a woman to choose??

Despite my reservations (what if I messed up? what if it was bad advice? What if the scarf unravelled and I had to start all over all over again?), I chose the third option, knitting the two colors together for one stitch in the new row and then dropping the red, leaving a tail to sew in later--which leaves me with the necessity of finding a needle large enough for a piece of yarn very, very soon. Perhaps my local craft store? I can only hope.

The scarf seems to be holding together nicely despite having now three loose tails that have yet to be secured, but I feel bouyed by success and hopeful that the final project will turn out nicely.

Tomorrow I will be making my first Michigan left turn. I have much to say about the Michigan Left, but I will leave that for tomorrow. You can wait with anticipation for my rant, and it will be satisfying, at least to me.

Learning lots,
Monica



p.s. Ever wonder what the things on the bottom of jet wings next to the engines (they look kind of like elongated silver footballs... see the pic below) are? They are hydraulic actuator covers--aerodynamic covers for the hydraulics that move the flaps on the wings! Thanks, Yahoo!, for this bit of trivia.