Not perfect,and with some repeated sections

thats right, not perfect. When I was witting my thesis, when any one is writing a thesis, all the people who have been there before you give you advice, generally good and appropriate advice that you may or may not follow at the time. Much of that advice you take with you and use latter as part of life, even if you were not able to follow it at the time. Once such piece of advice was -
There is finished and there is perfect, rarely are they the same.
That was the case this week in my knitting, after the drastic and perhaps ill-considered frogging I was happy just to finish, and I know its not perfect, so today I have something finished, not quite but off the needles for now, with very little to do. I apologise for missing my midweek post, I had one of those weeks where I was out Monday, Tuesday, Thursday night, and late home Wednesday - there just wasn't time, some weeks are like that.


So last week I left with you a disturbing image of a complex cable dropped down and in the early stages of repair. As I indicated, it took some time, and a lot of focus to repair. Would I recommend it - probably not, but then again I think it looks better afterwards, not perfect mind you, but better. I know exactly where my repair is, you see I had yarn left over afterwards. This worried me, how could I knit the same rows with the loops of frogged yarn and have one loop of several inches of yarn left over? Then I realised that the left over had migrated from a yarn join, a few stitches past my frogging pond. So because of the yarn ends and the left over loop I know exactly where I was working, if not I might not be able to spot the repair.


This is the cable, finished, not perfect, but better I think. I still managed to twist one of the cables the wrong way, despite my care and attention .... knowing now what is involved in a repair I can live with that - or I might duplicate stitch the correct twist in (I think that will work - don't you?). One thing that made the repair so difficult was at several stages the cables grow from 5-out-of-1 stitch increases. In my innocence I dropped down between markers - not realising that some of these increases were positioned across the borders of the repeats - and so only partly frogged as I dropped the stitches down. I'm not sure I can explain any better than that - but my wee brain took a good half an hour to comprehend why I could not pick up and knit just inside the repeats, and of course I had frogged right down to the first row of the chart - adding to the difficulty score. Of course I worked this all out after I dropped the stitches right to the bottom of the chart ... no before.


So after that I continued to knit up the yoke, completely missing the decrease row after the tangled cables until I was a good 3.5 inches past them. Once you have frogged this cable and lived to blog the tale ... well frogging 3 inches of stocking stitch knit flat, with hundreds of teeny tiny stitches on 2.5 mm needles - well that is no worries at all. So I frogged, correctly decreased, knit back up, decreased again (I was looking for them that time), and worked the neck band. Then just to make things fun - instead of picking up loops along the lower edge of the ribbing and working a three-needle bind off, I kitchenered the bind off. I'm fussy like that. I suspect the bind off would be a more stable finish and stop the neck from stretching ... but I like to invisibly finish details like this where I can.


And so now I have this, a cardigan that fits me (Yeah!), that just needs two front bands. I'm happy - and I think that blocking will open up the cable and just settle every thing down. All I need to do is sort some buttons ... and I'll start that band.







And sock yarn, I rescued this yarn from the hands of another knitter, honestly she nearly begged me to buy it first and so prevent her from adding it to her stash (my story and I'm sticking to it)... she had another 3 in her hand that she did buy ... but needed me to buy this one. She had two set aside as sure buys and asked if any one new of any reason she shouldn't buy this one, I couldn't ignore her plea for help could I? I had to say that I wanted it. She did accept my reason, happily, she let go of the skein and handed it over! And its so purdy .... so purdy .... socks for a little girl I think. Another nice colour way from Vintage Purls.





While on the subject of quotes, I came across this one during the week, in search of things about knitting - put that on your needles and knit it, a feminine complement to - put that in your pipe and smoke it!: latish 19C-20.