Oh what a week I’m having. There are two crafty deadlines, school work that has stepped up a notch or 15 recently, and then I was called in for a full day of jury duty yesterday. Despite the fact that waiting in the jury room all morning was really, really boring and that I’m now going to be playing catch-up all week, the experience was actually kind of interesting in the end. I know, I’m totally batshit crazy.

But in the meantime, I’m really psyched to be able to share a design preview with you all and talk about process. When Elinor announced the Socks Revived Design Contest a few weeks ago, it seemed like a great opportunity to work up a chart I’d been toying with and make it into an actual knitted object. The chart began as a reworking of a particular design in this book, which I recently discovered we have in our university library.

I modified the chart to make it fit my gauge and stitch count for a pair of fair isle socks, cast on and went with it. My first attempt looked pretty great from the front:

so you’ll just have to take my word for it when I say that the back of this sock is a disaster. I tried to break up a large chart of overlapping repeats by putting a bunch of vertical stripes down the back of the leg. While this is a nice way to break up the visual “jump” that you encounter with colorwork in the round, and offers an easy way to adjust size, it looked crappy and it was an awkward width when it came time for a heel flap. Rrrrrrip!

I futzed with the chart more, and by this time it had been so futzed with that it can be described as being loosely inspired by what I originally saw in the Anatolian Knitting Designs book, made it fit my stitch count, and after trying 900 different and ridiculously complicated heels, I decided what I like best, and what fits my foot best, is a good, sturdy heel flap with gussets:

This will be the heel in the final pattern. I love it because it’s worked with the background color held double-stranded so the fabric is a pretty close match to the feel of the rest of the sock. And I have heels of steel, apparently, and will felt and wear through almost anything, so I’ll take all the extra sturdiness I can get.

The problem with the sock you see in that picture, however, is that the toe is heinous:

It pained me so to even take that picture, and then to post it on the internet?! I assure you I ripped that sucker out long ago. That ugly, square, floppy, weirdly bendy toe is long gone. I was trying to continue the lines from the chart and ended up with some really long floats in which my toes would always be getting caught, and then there’s the ugliness factor. Yuck. I decided the best thing to do was just to continue the chart as I had been working it and maintain that design as best I could while decreasing on the edges of the sock. And I’m quite pleased with the result:

And what you see there is, with a few details tweaked, what the final design will look like. As per the rules of Elinor’s contest there will be more than one size, which has been my main challenge given the large, unwieldy chart. In the end I decided the best way to deal with that would be to do what a lot of designers do to make fair isle mitten patterns with multiple sizes: change the gauge. The orange and white socks are designed for my feet, and as a result, they’re kind of big, and I like sturdy yarn so I’m using pretty heavy sock yarns (more on yarn details when I unveil the final product). I’m currently working up a smaller version using more lightweight yarns and so far as I can tell it’s working well, and it’s helping me work the rough edges out of the pattern. Now if I can just finish it all in time to publish by Friday!

So I was taking some UFO photos of a hat I’d been working on the other day when I noticed something. A mistake. In my otherwise perfect, glorious, tiny tiny cables.

First I took this shot of the hat, then I looked down and cursed every curse in the book:


Not seeing the problem? Check out this close-up of the offending region.



After breaking out in a cold sweat, pouring myself a healthy dose of liquor, and a quick google search, I rediscovered this post from the Yarn Harlot that I had read some time ago… She describes two methods for fixing this kind of thing: 1. “the proper way” (her words) and 2. “desperate measures” (aka a major cheat). While I’m normally the sort of lady that will head straight for the cheat, I noticed this “cheat” involved SEWING. Not sewing like sewing a seam (which I hate and completely suck at), but sewing like duplicate stitches and well, I’d rather create a giant unraveling hole in the middle of my cabled cashmere hat than do ANYTHING that resembles SEWING. So I opted for “the proper way.” Of course, I documented the experience. I don’t know why. It’s not like that would save my knitting if I screwed it up beyond repair. Something sick and twisted that resides deep in the depths of my soul made me do it. And I could NOT have done this without that Harlot tutorial. Thank you, Harlot. You saved my ass. This explanation that follows is just that – an explanation of what I did. If you want a tutorial head over to the Harlot.

Step 1: I isolated the stitches that would have to be unraveled in order to make this cable, well – cable, instead of march straight along like it is doing in the pictures seen above. Since I had already knit a couple cable twists beyond the one in question a total of 4 stitches were involved – not just the two in the middle that should have cabled, you see, because later on they traveled, and twisted around some other stitches and they allll got involved in this mess. So first I followed those four stitches down below the row where the error occurred and stuck a circular needle through them to hold them so the entire thing wouldn’t unravel.

Step 2: I unraveled, and realized I had stuck the needle through the wrong stitches. Oops. No biggie – I just shifted everything one stitch to the right, and exchanged that stumpy bamboo needle for a slick, stabby metal one and took a deeeeep breath. Here it is, all unraveled past the error.

Step 3: I found the bottom-most one of those scraggly pieces of yarn and used that metal needle (which was a US 2, a slightly smaller size than I knit the rest of the hat on, just to make the reconstruction a little bit easier) and knit the row that had the error in it – CORRECTLY this time.

Step 4: I breathed. I took a sip of that drink. Again, I found the bottom-most scraggly, unraveled yarn and used it to knit up another row. Again and again, until I had this:

PERFECT. Angels were singing. I stopped sweating. It was a great day. This hat, you see, is a Christmas present for my dear friend Cassie. And had I given her the hat with the cable error in it, although she may not have even noticed, I would KNOW. And every time I would look at my friend after that, forevermore, all I would see would be screwed up cables, and it would ruin our friendship. Forever. And I just can’t have that.

Tired of looking at the same hat? Me too. I knit this one in record time. I cast on late on the 22nd so I’d have a plane-friendly project to take to Oregon for Christmas, and finished it on the 27th, as my parents and I were arriving on the Oregon coast. I’m sure it will be received well. I’ll make the official FO post soon and I promise, I’ll keep it brief!