I bought the yarn at the Knitting and Stitching Show (see previous blog entry!) from the Fancy Yarn Specialists stall. Very Jazzy it is too - hard to knit with (it's a sort of double stranded yarn with sparkley blocks like the rungs of a ladder joining the 2 strands), and the work grows slowly - I've been at this on and off since October.
Anyway, I decided I *really* needed to get moving and so Saturday I knitted like a mad thing. Finished the 1st ball, joined the second (the instructions are simple - cast on 100 sts - R1. Increase 1 stitch in 1st stitch, knit to the last 2 sts. Knit last 2 sts together. R2. Knit 1st 2 sts together, knit to last stitch, increase 1 stitch in last stitch. Repeat rows 1 and 2 until you finish 2 balls of yarn) and was going great guns.
Yesterday morning (Sunday) I got up and started at it again. The pattern calls you to always increase on one end and decrease on the other, so, as you can see from the picture, you end up with a diamond shaped piece of knitted spingly spangly material - aka a glam shawl. What this means though, is that as time goes on, you get a tail, along the decrease/cast of side, which hangs down, and every so often it wrapped round the needle at the end and needed detangling.
I'd already done it once yesterday morning and was just doing it, very carefully, for the 2nd time, when, disaster struck, the thing which popped off the end of the needle WASN'T the tail which had wrapped around the needle end but the proper stitches which should have been there. Not normally a major disaster (more an inconvenience) but in this case the weight of the fabric pulling down actually caused the stitches to run - like a ladder in a pair of tights.
As I lifted up the end to investigate what was happening, more stitches came of the needle and ran, virtually back to the bottom of the piece of work. Arghhhhhhhhhh!
Every time I touched it, it got worse. Not only that, but the end which the stitches had fallen off was the shaped end - with the casting off - almost impossible to pick up again.
After screaming a bit (well inside my head anyway!) I laid the piece out on the floor and tried to look at what needed to be done. The loose nature of the stitches and the slippyness of the yarn made it nearly impossible. Every stitch investigated - even very very gently - resulted in the 2 either side being dropped. It was getting worse rather than better.
I knew the dropped stitches on the side by the shaped edge were lost, so I decided to grit my teeth and pull back the 10 or so rows which were really destroyed and pick up from there.
As it turned out, this was not such a good idea, just the act of pulling back each stitch had the effect of dropping the 1 or 2 stitches below it. Nightmare.
I kind of knew that I was going to have to ditch the whole thing, and actually coming from that point of view (like Mum's motto for fixing things which is "it's broken anyway, so I can't break it any worse" I thought I'd try and rescue *some* of the stitches, even if I didn't pick them all up perfectly, so long as I have a needle through them, I can then pick them up as I come past on the next row of knitting.
So I started by taking the whole thing off the needles and spreading it out very carefully on the floor...
I then started, with random double pointed needles and crochet hooks and cable needles to just *ssssssslide* the needles through any visible stitch loops - I didn't care whether they were on this row, or the one below or the one below that. The important thing was to stop them running any further down.
I still dropped stitches but I saved quite a few too. I kept thinking "I'll just get 5, or just 10 this time" and kept coming back to it all day. Another 5, another 10.
Soon, nearly all the stitches were at least safe on a needle of some sort...
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| It's a bit blurry but you get the picture - 3 different sized needles just holding the stitches! |
Then I thought, what I really need is to be able to pick this up - all this was done with it (and me) lying on the floor. Stitch holders were the answer. But, I only had one, and it was about 4 inches long - not really up to the job. I was just about to head off to Hobbycraft to see if they had any, when I happened upon an article which explained how to make them out of coathangers!
I have no pictures of the next bit - but basically I transferred all the stitches on the needles laid on the floor, onto the 2 big DIY stitch markers I made, and the little one I had already. YAY!
I then decided to transfer all the stitches to a needle smaller than the one they'd originally been knitted on - I thought it'd be easier to catch them all - so I went for size 6 needles (the shawl is done on 10s) I also decided to pick them up the WRONG way - ie starting with the end where the thread was - because this would mean that I'd have to pass them from one needle to the other to get them the right way, and this would give me the chance to look at each stitch and work out if it was dropped and then do whatever was needed to fix it.
So by the end of yesterday, I managed to get them all onto a nice size 6, the right way and with 'nearly' all the stitches there... 96 out of my 100.
This morning I started bright and early again - and this time I began knitting again - this time from the 6 onto an 8mm needle - another opportunity to check each stitch - and I found 2 where I'd hastily picked up 2 stitches into one - thereby finding 2 more, by the time I got to the end of the row. I also found a completely new dropped one I'd missed, and realised then that the final missing one must have been the last one cast on at the end of the row which is barely more than a twist in the thread until it's been knitted into a few times.
Yay! 100 stitches. What a relief. I knitted the next row also on an 8mm and so I was ready to go back up to the original 10mm super chunky needles that this all slipped off in the beginning (grrrrrr!)
So, now how to stop it happening again - my 10mm needles now have a "stitch guard" at the end to stop any chance of tangleing or to stop anything dropping off the end...
You may notice the festive theme - circles cut from one of the Christmas cards which are coming down today!
And so, here I am, back to probably somewhere where I was on Saturday, but not quite caught up as the thread which was pulled out from those 10 rows, still hasn't been used up...
As was posted onto my facebook status - I thought knitting was supposed to be a relaxing thing!
Sheeeeeeesh!
Nice save! But for Shawl Two, Two Words: Circular Needle!!
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