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:
- 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)
- 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!
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