G. Knerd

When last we spoke, I was in a somewhat troublesome state.  I was at the end of the second strip of the Wedding Blanket, and had realized that the beginning of the strip:

Didn’t exactly look much like the end of the strip:

Namely, the problem was that I needed a few more rows to get the same effect on both ends.  Doing more rows, however, would cause this strip to be longer than the middle and also look funky in the tree panel, so that solution was right out.  Ignoring it was also a possibility (what I like to call The Amish Solution), but one that even non-knitters would be likely to recognize.

After sleeping on the problem, I came up with a solution – Knitting Plastic Surgery.

In regular Knitting Surgery, you do something very precise like unravel a few stitches for a few rows to get to a mistake and then knit them back in the right pattern.  In Knitting Plastic Surgery (a term that, according to Bing, has only been used once – by SJ on a post by limedragon), I’m going to claim that one is engaging in Knitting Surgery in order to lessen – but not fix – a mistake.  (Note: this is not how SJ is using it in her comment – what she’s referring to is what I call regular Knitting Surgery.)

Armed with my new plan, I immediately took the four worst offending stitches and unraveled them to two rows past the cable cross.

I then picked up the remaining stitches with the left needle.

Instead of following the pattern (which would here have me knit two rows plain before crossing the cables), I immediately crossed them, thus allowing me to have three rows of plain knitting after the cross instead of one.  That makes the edge noticeably better, without being a hugely obvious mistake in the shortened distance between crossings.

And with that, I’m calling this panel done.  In fact, I’ve been working so hard (while I haven’t been blogging) that this panel is cast off and I’m already almost half done with the third – and final – panel.  It’s amazing what a deadline can do for a project…

I’ve heard that the Amish have a tradition in the amazing quilts they make, that there’s always at least one small mistake in those intricate pieced compositions, because only God can be perfect or make perfect things.  Now, given that they’re introducing these flaws on purpose, that always seemed a bit egotistical to me (kind of a “well, I could be perfect if I wanted to, but I think I’ll let God have the glory this time”), but at the same time, I kind of thought it was a neat tradition.

Then I found this:

If you can’t see it (the picture isn’t as clear as I’d like) that’s a lone purl stitch in what is supposed to be a column of knit stitches in 2×1 ribbing.  I generally do 2×2 or 1×1, so the 2×1 was giving me a bit of trouble, but I didn’t realize I’d messed it up until I was a few inches past that point.  And the pattern doesn’t really lend itself to surgery, given the “p3 tog” all over the place.

If that were the only problem with this sock, I think I would have embraced the Amish tradition and just went with it, all the while smirking about how I could fix it if I really wanted to, but…

…well, that’s not how it went down.

It all started when I got it in my head that I wanted to knit my next pair of socks with Tofutsies.

I picked a stitch pattern, and swatched to determine how many stitches to cast on.

This was the first place I thought “er, maybe this won’t work out”.  See how the picture is really pretty and elegant, and the swatch just…isnt?  That’s largely due to the fact that the knitting in the picture is severely blocked, and since my socks will, er, likely never be blocked in their lifetimes, that should have given me a clue.

Still, I thought maybe being stretched around my foot would kind of act like a pseudo blocking, so I figured out how many stitches I needed to get around my foot and stretch to get over my ankle, and I did some math to come up with cuff ribbing that would flow into the pattern, and I was off.

At this point, I probably should have noticed that things weren’t coming out like I wanted, that instead of being elegant and graceful this was just…bumpy.  And angular.  And not what I wanted at all.

I should have noticed…but I’m stubborn, so I kept going.  I thought to myself, “Well, that’s just the first few rows in pattern – after a few more, it’ll even out and look okay.”

It wasn’t until I was two and half times through the pattern (42 rows + 12 rows of cuff), that I tried it on again.  And, well, it wasn’t really getting more elegant.

Plus, around the same time, I discovered that purl stitch.  And in light of everything else about this sock, it seems like it’s just foolish to keep going.  It’s off to the frog pond for this one.

Because, you know, I’m not Amish.