Knitting Surgery

The Hanami is finished (hoorah!) and blocking now. More on that in my next post when it's released from the pins...


Before I could block I had to perform a little surgery on a couple of mistakes I'd made in the knitting. As someone who HATES ripping back when I find a mistake more than 2 rows back my first thought is: can I fix this with a bit of post knitting darning? (Actually, my first thought is - can I get a way with this?? And after debating with myself that no I can't live with it - I move on to the fixing options.)


The first of the Hanami examples occurred in the basket weave half of the stole. I still don't entirely know what happened - but I suddenly notice a big (bigger than expected) hole in the pattern about 15 rows back. Sigh. No amount of stretching or blocking was going to fix the problem. So before blocking I threaded a darning needle and carefully tried to create a bit more structure to minimise the hole.


The second happened in the very boring final repeat. I felt it was the knitting gods smiting me for mocking how dull the knitting was. Somehow I managed to drop about 5 stitches from the needles and they dropped about 4 rows. Grrrrrrr..... I picked them up and thought all was fine, but about 4 rows later I noticed that I had somehow converted what should have been two blossoms to one. And as this section wasn't the random part - it was pretty obvious. More darning needle surgery.



Do other knitters do this? Or is it considered a cop out? I don't know. One of the benefits/drawbacks of being a self taught make it up as you go along knitter is that you don't know if what you are doing is amateur or genius! You live in happy ignorance of whether your latest bit of work is the sign of a true craftsman or of clumsy hands!?