G. Knerd

Every now and then, I put down a knitting project only to come back to it weeks or months later and realize that I have no idea what my past self was thinking when I was knitting on it earlier.  Generally, it’s obvious that I had a plan and that I had every reason to believe that it would go well, but when I come back to it I have absolutely zero recollection of what’s going on anymore.

It’s at times like that where I wish I could go back in time and just ask myself, “What were you thinking?”  Mind you, in these circumstances it’s not in the smack-myself-in-the-face, what-were-you-thinking way, but a calm, interested hrm-didn’t-quite-follow-you-there, could-you-explain kind of way.

For example, I started a pair of socks while The Blanket Thief and I were in Europe.  I wanted something relatively simple, but not so simple that I was bored, so I decided to make up a two-cable traveling pattern that’s inspired by a couple kids playing tag.  The idea was that one cable would chase the other back and forth across the socks, bouncing off of the “walls” and going through a round of tagbacks whenever they crossed.

Recently, I dragged these out of the basket and started working on them again, only to pause and realize that the back cable crossings (above), didn’t match the front cable crossings (below).  Namely, while on the backs I’d apparently decided to stop moving one (but only one) of the cables, on the front I’d kept at the full pattern as established.

I spent a good amount of time trying to figure that one out.  The back was going to turn into the heel, so was I planning to have the one cable travel to the other side of the sock and mirror the placement of the first, stopped cable?  Had I intended the first cable to double back and meet the other one, to kind of check on why it hadn’t started?  Was it even possible that this had just been an accident, and I somehow hadn’t managed to pick up on it for four rows?

Eventually, I decided that, barring time travel, I was never going to figure out what the plan had been, and without a plan it was just silly to continue with a deviated pattern.  With that decision, it was time to engage the Knitting Surgery.  I picked back the four rows of the affected stitches, making a neat-but-really-confusing section.

Then I knit it all back up in the original pattern to match the front.  I’ve got a new plan for how it’s all going to go now, and I’m sure it’s much better than my original plan.

At this point, though, I really hope I never do run into my past self to ask her what the original plan was.  I don’t want to find out that I’m wrong, and really her plan was much better than mine if I could have just remembered it.

Remember a few weeks ago, when I found out that the border for Wedding Blanket the First was maybe a little too big?  If not, you really should read it – it’s worth a laugh or two at my misfortune.  Don’t worry, I can wait.

Okay, so how do you fix a problem like that?  An extra foot in two sides of a one-piece border with mitered corners and a non-trivial pattern throughout?

Well, it starts with a small pair of scissors.

This part is not for the faint of heart, but it’s not as bad as doing fair isle knitting – you have to snip the yarn a row or two above where you actually want to join to, and then unravel slowly down to the desired place, picking up the stitches on a needle once you get there.

You do the same thing to the side that you want to join it to, kitchner the two sides together, and…

…voila!  Another nearly perfect join!

Then you do that at the other side, and suddenly it looks exactly like it did before, except it actually fits the blanket it was made for, and you have a couple of extra bits hanging around.

Now, question becomes: what, exactly, does one do with a couple nearly-one-foot long sections of border like this?

In my last post, I mentioned that I was just about to start blocking the border for Wedding Blanket the First.  This was a somewhat momentous occasion, as it’s been months since I finished knitting said border, and at no time did I actually measure the in-progress or finished border against the blanket it was intended for.

Can you see where this is going?

It all started with a pile of border – when I was knitting it, it seemed like miles, but in retrospect it was really only several yards long.

The border got the customary dunking in water, was squeezed out, and then I laid it out in a rough rectangle on the floor.

This was when I started to get nervous.  This seemed…large.  In fact, this seemed like the size I had wanted the blanket to be, although I was pretty sure that the blanket was not, in fact, this large.

Laying out the blanket only confirmed my fears.  Somewhere, something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

The width is about right, but the length?  Not so much.  No amount of fudging is going to bring that back into alignment, either, unless I want to make the long-edge border ruffled.

So there’s going to be some knitting surgery in the near future.  I need to extract almost a foot from both long edges.

After that, the slog to attach said border will commence.

Just between you and me, I don’t think I’m going to get this done within a year of the wedding.  Maybe we should make the new deadline 18 months?

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…

Although I haven’t managed to do a proper post on the Wedding Blanket, progress is going well so far.  I have almost five feet (by 1.5 feet, so 7.5 square feet) of knitting done at this point, and it’s relatively gorgeous and soft and comfy and everything one could ask for in an heirloom blanket.

Except…I started thinking about the stitch pattern I was using as a band to separate the larger pattern sections.  And I thought…well, what if I did something else instead?  Like, say, clover stitch?

I even went so far as to swatch it out.

The thing is, while the clover border is slightly swoopier, and maybe I would pick it instead of the standard border I’m using if I were starting from scratch, the fact is that I have seven and a half square feet of knitting done.  That’s got to be at least a sweater, right?

But still, I considered my options.  The best contender was that I could do knitting surgery by unravelling just the borders (because they luckily had the same number of stitches in both patterns) and then knit them back in the new pattern.  Which would take forever, and probably look a little funky, but it would be the best pattern possible.

Luckily, at that point I consulted the Blanket Thief, who first gave me the “you’re crazy” look and then explained that to a non-Knitter (especially one who was never exposed to both patterns side by side) the difference between them was negligible.  And when I tried to argue with him that it did matter, and that I wanted this to be perfect, he asked how long it would take to make the change.

I thought quickly: Well, four columns, roughly 400 rows, so 1600 rows of fussy knitting surgery…that equals…lots of time.

And then I looked at the knitting again, next to the swatch.

You know, actually?  I think what I’ve got might be better anyway.

One of the top projects I’m working on right now is a blanket for my best friend’s wedding.  Being me, I decided I was going to design a brand new pattern for this, bought the yarn before I’d figured out what I was going to do, and then once I’d picked out the stitch patterns I liked and figured out what order I wanted them to be in, I cast on and started knitting.

I was about this far when I realized I’d made a mistake already:

My plan was to have a row of eyelets at the beginning of one of the patterns.  You’ll notice, there are no holes in this knitting.

There proceeded about a minute of internal monologue berating myself for not charting out the pattern, especially considering that I do intend to write this up as an official pattern someday.  The only excuse I have to explain it is that I wanted to get knitting right away. We’ll not examine the fact that I probably lost as much time fixing this mistake as I would have charting the pattern (note: I’ve apparently not learned my lesson, as the pattern remains uncharted at this time).

After the mental tongue-lashing, I went to work unraveling the few rows I had.  I decided that it would be good enough to unravel just the section that was messed up, and although the process would be fussier I would save more time not needing to re-cast on and re-knit everything else.

I always think knitting mid-surgery looks really fascinating.  I wonder if I could make a career around just doing knitting surgery.  Is there even such a thing as a knitting surgeon?  And couldn’t you imagine knitting surgeon specialties, like Cable Surgeon or Lace Surgeon?

Maybe I’ve been watching too much Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice…

But, anyway, after more time than I wanted to spend on it, I was back where I should have been all along.

Here’s hoping the rest of it stays on chart (assuming I ever write up the chart, of course).

Remember how Monkey Kitty has an extreme fondness for all things yarn and wool related?  Well, I wasn’t telling the whole story in the last post when I told you about how I’d thwarted his attempts to destroy the knitting.

See, I apparently didn’t learn my lesson about leaving hats hanging out around the house, and that night while we were sleeping, Monkey Kitty stole into our room, jumped up on the dresser, and stole another hat!  Since he was stealthy enough not to wake us, no one stopped him from actually damaging the hat, so what I woke up to that morning was this:

Now, really, that doesn’t seem so bad, actually…until you get up close with the damage, at which point this:

And this:

Plus a couple other loose ends convinced me that the hat was too far gone to be saved.  Luckily, this wasn’t a hand made hat and didn’t carry much sentimental value, so after a few minutes of cursing myself for leaving it out and Monkey Kitty for taking advantage of the situation, I moved on to thinking, “Well, what can I do with this now?”

And then I thought, “You know, I could take it apart and salvage the yarn for another project…”  (We’ll forget, for a minute, that the yarn for the hat is pure polyester and thus relatively unlikely to ever be knit by me.)

After a couple stitches had been unraveled, I got a clue that maybe this would be a messier process than I had signed up for:

It turns out that chenille sheds.  Massively sheds.  Especially when you’re pulling the length of it through the stitches to get to a point where you can just start unraveling.

After about a dozen stitches, something else occurred to me.  Something I’d read about on the Yarn Harlot’s blog just a few months ago.  Something about, er…unraveling ribbing?

Yep, that’s right – ribbing can only be unraveled in one direction (took me about 3 days to accept it, so if you haven’t had the revelation – or the failed experience – give it a minute to sink in).  Which meant that while one side of the hole I was making was perfectly fine for unraveling:

The other side was having, er, difficulties:

Sighing, I decided to deal with that problem later, and soldiered on working the hole bigger until it reached all the way around the hat:

And after that, it was pure, unraveling goodness.  Am I the only one who gets a perverse pleasure out of frogging knitting?  Especially store-bought knitting – there’s something so powerful in the idea that you can take this thing and reduce it down to component parts which you can then use to make something else.

Or maybe that’s just me.  That’s cool, I’m used to being…special.

When everything was said and done (and after doing the same hole making/enlarging process on the other side of the non-ravelable half), I ended up with a huge pile of unusable “stuff” and a few balls of yarn:

Anyone want some polyester chenille yarn?  I think I’ve gotten all the pleasure I need out of it.

I’m kind of shocked to be in this position, actually.  I was really, really sure this was going to go differently.  I mean, it always does, right?

Last night, as I was putting the cARGHdigan away for the night, I suddenly had a thought.  A very disturbing, very unsettling thought.  A thought that threatened to cause me to unravel all manner of knitting – we’re talking serious inches here.

What I was thinking was, “Wait a minute, I don’t think this is what the picture that the Blanket Thief gave me looked like…”

See, the Blanket Thief sketched out exactly what he wanted me to knit him, and he was pretty adamant that he wanted it to look exactly like the picture.  The picture which, I suddenly realized, I hadn’t looked at in a couple weeks – long since before I worked out how big the diamonds would be, never mind since before I started actually knitting them.

I think my fingers were actually shaking when I pulled out the sketch.

Now, let’s compare that with what I’ve spent the past few weeks working on:

Notice anything wrong with these pictures?  What if I put them side-by-side?

Now do you see it?  The way that the drawing has a red diamond at the bottom, while the knitting…doesn’t?

Yeah, I was pretty pissed when I realized that.  I’ve been churning away at this one, knitting to the point that my fingers kind of ache (which, for me, is a heck of a lot of knitting).  And because this is all stockinette, half of this is purling.  Half!  If ever there were a physical representation of love and devotion, this is it.

It took me a few minutes to work myself up to accepting that I was going to have to frog it back.  I spent most of that time trying to determine if there were some more clever way I could do things.  I came up with some pretty good ideas, actually.

Option 1) Duplicate stitch the bottom red diamonds. The problem here would be the extra bulk for those diamonds, plus the issue of some of the base black yarn showing through the red.  Still, not completely unacceptable, and – considering how much time this would save versus the other knitting surgery options – a definite contender.

Option 2) Unravel just the black yarn and replace it with red. This would work for the upper half of the diamond, but the lower half isn’t just one piece of yarn back and forth – or, well, it is, but that same piece of yarn goes all the way to both sides of the fabric.  To get the same effect for the bottom of the diamond, I’d have to do something like cut through a stitch on every row that I wanted to replace and then tie down and weave in all the ends somehow.  The first part of the plan (the upper half of the diamond) has a lot of merit, but the ridiculousness of the bottom half would mean I’d likely find another method for at least that part if not the whole thing.

Option 3) Snip a thread and unravel the row right at where the problem stops (just below the tip of the red diamond, as everything above that is in pattern), put the stitches from the top on a holder while unraveling the bottom to where the problem starts (the bottom of the blue diamond), knit up in pattern, and then Kitchener stitch the two pieces together. This one is by far the hardest to put into words, but the most likely to have lasting success.  When I finished with it, there would be two (or maybe 10, depending on how you looked at it) extra yarn ends to tie down and weave in, but by and large this would likely be the most invisible knitting surgery.  For the sake of saving time, I might combine the first half of option 2 with this one, but I think option 3 is likely the “right” fix.

I’m sure there are other options for the fix, but those are the ones I came up with at the moment.  Luckily (and I regularly thank whatever managed to bring the Blanket Thief into my life for situations just like this) the Blanket Thief came downstairs and asked me what I was up to.

“Trying to figure out how to unravel the least amount possible,” I told him, staring intently at the cARGHdigan.

“Er…why, exactly, would you unravel any of it?” he asked, alarmed.

“Because I screwed up.”  When he looked confused, I explained, and when he still didn’t say anything right away, I whipped out the original sketch and put it next to the knitting, so he could see just how much I’d messed up.

He spent a minute looking back and forth between the two, before he announced, “I don’t want you to unravel it.  I like it better this way.  It’s pointier.”

I did my best to make sure that he was serious, that he wasn’t trying to just protect my feelings, but he was adamant that he wanted a design change – luckily, exactly the design change I’d accidentally made.  Despite my hounding and his unwavering insistence to keep it this way, there’s still a chance that he would rather have the red diamonds on the ends, but…at this point, I don’t think I can go through that again.  We’re committed.  We’re having blue diamonds on the top and bottom.  We’re going for pointier.

I mean, I’ve knit this much:

It’s a testament to how much I love him that I was even willing to consider frogging it, but now that the decision has been made, we’re sticking to it.  It’s not every day that the Knitting Fates let you dodge a bullet like this – you can’t question it too hard when it happens.

After all, the Knitting Fates don’t like being ignored.  I don’t want to think about what they’d do to me if I didn’t listen to them telling me to keep going.