knitting is a hereditary disease

Knitting disaster: averted!

Posted on 01/21/2008 by Andrea | Comments (2)
Filed under : Knitting, Tips

People say it's a good thing to make mistakes. Making mistakes allows us to learn, builds character, yadda yadda.

Those people are crazy.

I was too demoralized to mention it at the time, but when I was trying to finish Brad's St. Mawes sweater just before Christmas, I ran into a monumental knitting disaster.

This may be difficult to see, but it's a hole in the sweater. You see, I realized after I sewed the front and back together, knitted on the collar, and sewed on one of the sleeves, that I had knitted the sleeves FOUR INCHES too long. In the process of trying to remove the seamed sleeve, I accidentally CUT a stitch in the front of the sweater.

Let me pause here while we all finish gasping in horror.

Okay, I'm recovered now.

Like I said, I was too demoralized to face this. I put the sweater away for a month and finally got up the nerve to bring it back out and figure out what to do about this problem. The answer was simpler than I had even hoped. There's a very clearly photographed example in Knitty of how to fix this type of problem: Knitty: Repairs 101. You basically undo the knitting horizontally until you have weave-in-able ends and use a new piece of yarn to graft the stitches together, much like a kitchener stitch.

See? All better:

The only real problem I ran into was that this hole occurred in the second-to-the-edge stitch, so I didn't have a long end on that side to weave in. Here was my solution:

I tied a new piece of yarn to the short end using as tight of a square knot as I could manage. I plan on weaving the knotted end into the sleeve seam.

All's well that ends well. Now I just have to take care of that small problem of the extra eight inches of sleeve.