Monday 25 May 2015

In the company of rasta and fratch

You know how you are knitting along and you are having an otherwise seriously great day, and then you realize you have done the stupidest thing but you really don't want to fix it because it looks so nice as is?

Yeah.

I started another wee Envelope sweater, this time for my sweet bee, Carter.

 This is the first photo I took, just to check the colours.  I love this combination and I sincerely love working with this yarn.  If there was a desert island yarn for babies and kids, I would make sure this was on the list.  Baby Bamboo from Sirdar and Sirdar Smiley Stripes, both wool and bamboo blends.

If you see a little seam like thing, as I did after the photo, you will assume it is said seam.  It is not.  Apparently, I changed from knit to purl each of these rounds without the blink of an eye.  I ought to have stopped right there and fixed it.


 I did think about it.  I wanted to see how the blue section of the Stripes yarn would look against the solid blue.  I needed it to show up and it does, just enough to make it work.  By the time, I got to see how it looked, I had forgotten about the blue and just kept motoring along.

And then I missed a couple of things.  Those couple of things meant that the back was started on the wrong side and that I missed taking out the underarm stitches.  Awareness hit after the whole back yoke was knit and I was trying to sort out the front pickups.  Now remember, this is a wee baby sweater, so it isn't a huge amount of knitting, but it is just so cute.  And I am just so lazy. I let it percolate most of yesterday.

I decided to pick up the stitches for the front, as if I had done everything right, and was thinking about those not cast off underarm stitches.  I could just cast off, and  have the 'seam' be a little rotated off of the base of the arm.  It would mimic the kind of sleeve setting that really well made clothing has, where the seam of a sleeve, sits off the seam of the seam of the body of the garment. It could work, right?

And then I did this.

In order for all this to work, I had to pick up the stitches in the colour that my live stitches were for the front yoke. As you can see, I did not.  The pick up ought to have been blue.  It is creamy green, almost celadon.  This kind of error is usually a message.  There is no way to get past this wrong colour.  My hands are sending me a message.  'Stop.  Think about this', the hands are shouting, only the conscious brain attached to the hands, doesn't want to see.

This morning my closest companions are rasta and fratch.  I don't want to reknit the yoke.  It's stripes with the attached i-cord are a little fussy, and I am pretty pleased with the way it looks.  Because of all my other mess of stupid things, a possibility exists, that maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't be hard to sever the sleeve and pick it up again and knit down.  

I would establish the stitches for the sleeve on the yokes, and because the yokes are two completely separate pieces of knitting, could add those missing underarm stitches that I ought to have cast off, making the sleeve just the smallest bit larger at the top. Come to think of it, if I treated those missing stitches as a gusset, as you would on a gansey....  

Or I could do the smart thing.  I could get over my lazy and rip it all back and start over, fixing every single error along the way.  

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