string theory
Last night my world was rocked. Everything I knew about knitting changed. It’s scary. I have real power.
Sure, one can knit and purl and change color, create paterns and stitch in different ways, but as my knitting guru Betsy taught me, you can travel through time.
I’ve made mistakes (in knitting, not just my life). We all have… And, heretofore, that has meant ripping out rows. Working backwards and unknitting until I find the problem. Hopefully, I notice it before I climb too terrible higher in the piece. I’m sufficiently advanced enough to know how to catch a dropped stitch, and, in the same vein, I learned how to change a knit stitch into a purl a few rows later.
I’m working on my first cabling project, a scarf for my mother. Between knitting before breakfast, sneaking in the rogue row at work, and sitting down at Monday’s 3DB knit night, I mistakenly skipped a cabling. And I didn’t find it until three rows later. (Between Indian food, conversation and TV, you might have knitted on by, too!)
I really wasn’t in the mood to work back, stitch by stitch to fix it, nor was I willing to accept the error and hand an obviously hand-crafted (i.e., flawed) gift to Mamman. Betsy, impressed by my self-taught cabling ambition, felt it was time to show me the magic that is selective ripping.
We dropped six stitches (it sounds scary than it was), held them on a spare needles, and proceeded to knit them back correctly using the saggy ladder rungs from whence they were ripped. Who knew? At times it was tricky and tight, but I cabled those three bad boys and climbed back up to my regularly scheduled knitting and resumed.
Emergency adverted. Cabling added after the fact. Knowledge in head. For the disbelievers in SF, I can show you tonight. Otherwise, go forth and knit. But use your power wisely.
Just try not to make mistakes in the first place.
