In the last post, we left a lovely all but in the middle sweater awaiting surgery:
This knittng surgeon is happy to repor that the patient is resting comfortably. Here’s how it went.
- With a circular needle, thread the circular into each stitch on the row below the stripe. This went uneventfully (sorry, no photo).
- Do the same for the row immediately above the stripe. Here I deviated from the orginal plan. I decided to just keep the big stripe on the top of the sweater – the stripe acts as waste yarn and holds the stitches that I want to graft in place
- Carefully pull out all the stitches of the first and last row of the stripe (save yarn for something else!). I only pulled out the bottom row of the stripe. This is how the sweater looks in its two parts:
Vaguely unsettling to see the sweater like this – almost like an amputation.
- With the bottom of the sweater, knit the same number of rows as the stripe.
But queasiness aside, I moved on to knitting the fill-in inches of the body on the bottom part of the sweater.
- Options here:
- Take a couple of long pieces of yarn and graft the two rows together
- Do a three-needle bind off with the two pieces.
I started with the grafting method – and it worked beautifully. Partly it is that this is a nice wool (this part of the sweater is in the reliable Cascade 200 Heathers) that has bounce and give, and partly it happens to be a dark color that will be forgiving of all the wonkiness. I grafted together the two parts of the sweater with about 3 shorter lengths of yarn like this:
Then I unraveled the old stripe with a “rip it” method.
There were a few places on the last round where the plies had been caught by the darning needle, they were snipped and I moved on. This is a little pile that will go into another project:
And the sweater? Pre-blocking it looks pretty good already. Patient is awaiting the weaving of ends and blocking.
Summary: This was not as bad as I feared – and the outcome totally worth it!
You’re a brave woman, but that stripe did need to go. Glad it went as smoothly as it did.
Totally amazing. I don’t think I could handle such serious surgery!
Fortunately all the stitches were contained (either on a needle or with waste yarn) at all times. I kept thinking that I’ve grafted a ton of sock toes, so this is a “giant toe.” LOL!