Knitting In Public

I wet and ‘blocked’ the surgical repair (see entry below), and it was all ready to be picked up on Monday.

Due to illness (not mine) the pickup didn’t happen.

I started to fold it up to have it delivered by my DH who was headed that way, when I discovered that the bound off edge that I had repaired was 3″-4″ shorter than the other end! There was not enough elasticity or drape in the bound off edge. This means that it would never fold correctly - a condition which I could not allow to continue!

I decided to unravel the repair and reknit it with a stretchier bind off. Since I was unraveling anyway, I wet the yarn and attempted to straighten it, so it would knit more consistently. Arg - acrylics! The yarn was still wavy, although it was way better than my first attempt. The garter edge still looks a little wonky because it won’t lie flat like the rest of the blanket, but I used a different bind off which resulted in an edge that would stretch and drape much like the other side of the blanket!

It was delivered today.  I am glad it is done, and done as well as I can - and that Sam (who I found out turns 4 on Sunday) will have his favorite blanket back tonight.

We had a small knitting ’emergency.’

Remember these two little guys that went home together?

Well, boys will be boys and puppies will be puppies. The end result was this:

Ooops.

So I was asked if I could rescue this, since it is Sam’s favorite blanket. At the very least, could I keep it from unraveling more than it already has?

Yesterday, I spent my afternoon assessing the damage, determining what the pattern was, and how far down the damage went. I carefully unpicked the edge (wouldn’t you know it would be the cast on edge that was damaged), and determined the best approach. I unraveled back to the lowest point of damage. This resulted in 3 separate strands of yarn of varying lengths. There was definitely a measure of yarn that was entirely missing.

I admit I should have washed the unraveled strands so that they would knit up better, but I didn’t really think about it as I was knitting. I was rather entranced with how to put it back together, and how noticeable it might be.

This is the result:

What do you think?

The pattern ended with 10 rows of garter stitch. The blanket is worn enough and washed enough that the knitting is very even, and the garter stitch “bumps” aren’t really bumps but just horizontal lines. So far, I’ve been unable to make the garter bumps lie flat, there are thicker parts where the ends are for each of the 3 sections of yarn, and it’s a little uneven because I didn’t wash and relax the yarn pieces before re-knitting. But I think I got 8 or 9 rows of garter stitch out of it, and the width of the ends only differ by about 1/4 inch.

There were several snags in the body of the blanket. I smoothed those places out as well, so those areas look ’just like new.’ 

Overall, a pretty good surgery. I think the patient will survive with just a few scars.