Knit Sisters

I’d like to claim that my time with Rogue has all been a joy, a lark, a summer fling, but I’m afraid there is a darker side. See this?

And this?

And, from the other side, this?

Hard won, hard won. What I never mentioned before when I was proudly showing you all those photos of the emergent hood (and brazenly fishing for compliments) was that when you finish with the two sides of the hood, you must graft them together at the top. Since this is a cable pattern, that means grafting in both stockinette and purl and alternating between the two over stitch combinations of two, three, four, and five.

I’ve grafted before, I thought. No problem. What I failed to appreciate was that I had never before grafted a combination of both knit and purl stitches with aran weight wool in 98 degree heat and 85 percent humidity.

So what?, I thought. I’ve got the chops. And with a little help from Montse Stanley, of Knitter’s Handbook fame, I can do this thing. Now you must understand that I love Montse Stanley. I love her not only for giving me instructions for eleventeen million cast-ons and cast-offs, but for help with beading and seams and…the list goes on. But there is this side to Montse, a Calvinist side, an uncompromising side, a side that has no truck with the kind of person who would call knitting “just” a craft or who might (great seething intake of breath here) suggest a quick, half-*ssed fix for a mistake.

Here’s Montse on errors (emphasis, by the way, as in the original):
“DON’T LIE TO YOURSELF. You will know the mistake is there and you may even feel compelled to point it out to others. It is better to face the truth and correct the mistake, no matter how painful.”

On a lapse in tension:
“Stitches that are uneven are NOT a charming sign of a handmade item. THEY ARE A SIGN OF POOR CRAFTSMANSHIP.”

Every time I try to rationalize some cockamamie solution (one that does not involve frogging, you see) to some awful knitting mistake I’ve made, I can hear her words ringing in my head: “…poor craftsmanship, poor craftsmanship, POOR CRAFTSMANSHIP…”

Okay, Montse, okay! I’ll do it right. Just leave me in peace. Just…get out of my head!

Montse was pretty much her old reliable self on the question of grafting—how it must be invisible, how you must not pull it too tight or leave it too loose—but after half an hour of struggling to understand her grafting instructions, I was not my old reliable self. I was sweating, I was angry, my yarn was knotting up, I was splitting stitches with my tapestry needle, and the graft was looking like a “sign of poor craftsmanship.” Actually, it looked worse than that. It looked like the work of malicious wild tree elves on crack.

I may have said something along the lines of, “The devil take Montse Stanley and the friggin’ high horse she rode in on! Oh, and you know what, Montse? I would never feel compelled to ‘point out a mistake to others.’ You know why? Because I’m not crazy. I’m not an obsessive compulsive like you. I’m not…” But then I realized with a thud that I am both obsessive compulsive and slightly crazy.

Just like Montse! My heroine!

Anyway, I let it sit overnight while I tried to decide if I ever wanted to knit again, let alone do this graft. The next day, I tried again with another set of instructions (sorry for the betrayal, Montse, but it just wasn’t working out between us…) and things went much better. I used the instructions for Kitchener stitch in Simple Socks by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, which for whatever reason was much more intuitively obvious to me. For the purl grafting, well, I just kind of had to feel the magic.

After all that,

“Is my head still here or has it exploded?”

Rogue, the Vest Years:

Now the only thing that stands between me and an FO are those sleeves. More on that Friday…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 7:49 am and is filed under Heavy sweaters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.