Code blue on the living room couch…
No, it’s not finished.
I’d hoped it would be, but folks, this thing is a LOT of knitting. Near as I can tell, it represents about six to eight hours of knitting per section, and my life rarely affords me that kind of down time these days.
But wait, I have news:
Last night–no exaggeration here–I executed the most complicated knitting rescue of my career. And, yes, it was on this project.
Here I was, happily knitting my way through the Daily Show and the Colbert Report–a nightly ritual for me–when I look down and see…it.
“It” being a botched cable no fewer than eight rows down. I’d twisted the stitches the wrong way so that instead of a charming horseshoe cable, I had something that looked more like a lazy tangle. And no, it’s not in this photo, so stop squinting. Still it was, too blatant to ignore, no matter how hard I wanted to be able to stand up and show you a finished product this morning.
Rather than rip out ten painful rows, I attempted the brain-surgery of knitting: ripping down and reknitting a cable sequence while still inside the fabric. It took both existing needles, a crochet hook, two dpns…and every brain cell I had.
Slowly, while employing all kinds of positive self-talk about my knitting prowess and the cooperative nature of good wool, I removed the eight involved stitches from the needle. Then I carefully pulled out each of the eight stitches all the way down past the offending cable, which was ten rows (and two complicated cable rows) below. I laid out each of the involved strands in row order behind my work.
Luckily, because this was the actual cable, I was always dealing with knit stitches. The tricky part came in reversing their order on the cable rows. One at a time, I reordered the stitches using the cable needle and then pulled the strand back through to loop to make a knit stitch with my crochet hook. Then I would remount the stitches on a spare dpn and start the process all over again with the next row.
The whole thing took me over an hour. I’m not entirely sure I couldn’t have just ripped out and knit back those ten full rows in that hour, but I feel so very proud of my repair skills that I don’t regret taking this tact. This is a photo of the actual restored cable. Not perfect, but pretty darn close. This is the Mt. Everest of fixing for me–a true achievement and a new level of skill that, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure I possessed.
This morning, I feel like I can do just about anything.
Will that entice me to clean my refrigerator? Um, no.
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