Epic Ripdown

So I decided to knit another of Cookie A’s patterns, Django.  I’m a huge Cookie fan – her socks are gorgeous and appear to be very intricate, but in most cases are a lot easier to knit than you’d think.  I whipped out a second pair of Twisted Flower during spring break – after gauge swatching carefully – and they turned out well:

so I figured Django would be a breeze.

Well.  To actually get gauge on these, I had to go down to a 1.5 needle and knit the sock very densely.  Which isn’t bad, but paired with a lot of cabling and very dense fabric makes for sore muscles.  Sore muscles lead to carelessness, which in my case leads to a very silly error on 6 stitches, which I didn’t notice until about 18 rows LATER.  In the pic below (which is overexposed and a bit hard to see detail, but it was 10pm and I had no natural light to work with, so give me a break), you can see that about every six rows, there is a simple 2/2 cable cross surrounded by nothing but stockingette.  The cable crosses are supposed to be underneath each other, not connected.

A close up, but still a little blurry

So my choices were:

  1. Rip back 18-20 rows over a multitude of cabling and risk making it way worse that it was, and spending about 4-5 hours fixing it (including ripping and re-knitting)
  2. Attempt the epic ripdown of only those six stitches for 18-20 rows and try reknitting them at the same gauge (about 1 to 1.5 hours). This still carried the risk of making it way worse than it was, in which case I’d still have to do #1 to fix the error

I decided to take a deep breath and try ripping down.  I placed markers on all of the rows that required the cable crossover (every 6th row in this case), and away I went:

Looks scary, doesn’t it?  I’d never ripped down more than two rows before, so I had no real idea what I was doing.  I was just lucky that most of the stitches were stockingette!  After a very tense hour where I wasn’t sure if it was going to work, I ended up pretty pleased with the result:

This red is impossible to photo without the glare (at least with a flash) but heres a better view:

Success!  I made it work, and with blocking you’ll never be able to tell there was an error! w00t!

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

About Leslie

Leslie is obsessed with knitting, and when possible, perfection in her knitting. All stripey socks must match exactly and all lace must be blocked severely. She has major love for all of her viewers/readers and hopes to keep blogging and podcasting for years to come.

One Response to Epic Ripdown

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *