Hook and Needles: Knitting and Crochet Blog (cool stuff, techniques, and things I find)

Ok, so here I am struggling to make the yoke for the GreenGable hoodie I’m knitting (from Vogue Knitting, Fall 2008), and I decide to try it on… It’s not bad, but the sleeves have these beautiful big cables and they look off. According to the instructions I was supposed to stop following the chart, and just do ribbing after row 4. I’ve done a good part of the yoke by this point, and I can see that I had more than enough space to complete another repeat of the chart.

I go to the Ravelry group for this hoodie, and I see that I’m not the only one thinking this. There is a thread discussing whether you were supposed to stop at row 4 of that or the next repeat… I looked at the pictures, and I really like how it looks with the extra repeat (like in the magazine), instead of the long ribbing on the shoulders.

I have 3 options:

• Leave it, and live with it.
• Frog the yoke, and start it over.
• Try to fix it.

I knew I wouldn’t be happy leaving it, and the yoke had given me enough trouble that the idea of having to make it again gave me a headache. So my strategy was to try to fix it, and only if it looked like minced meat, I would  frog the yoke.

Fortunately, the fixing was succesful. Here’s the before and after picture:

Before and After

This is by far the biggest fix I’ve ever done. I had to undo 19 rows and 24 stitches on both sleeves, and re-knit the cable. If you have never fixed your knitting this way, basically what you do is drop the stitches all the way down to where the error is, and re-knit it up. You can use a crochet hook to re-knit, but the area to fix was so big, I just used needles for most of it, and the hook just for the last couple of stitches.

I went down 19 rows!

I used double pointed needles, because the sweater at this point is so big, it would have been very uncomfortable to have to turn the knitting to do the wrong side.

It went more smoothly than I expected. The only thing that slowed me down was trying to ge the same tension as the original row, so I wouldn’t have too much yarn left at the end, or too little. In some rows I had to use a needle to pull some stitches to correct this problem.

This sweater’s been a headache! It’d better look amazing when I’m done!