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.

1. With a circular needle, thread the circular into each stitch on the row below the stripe.  This went uneventfully (sorry, no photo).
2. 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
3. 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.

1. 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.

1. Options here:
   1. Take a couple of long pieces of yarn and graft the two rows together
   2. 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!

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