Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Can’t stop for nothin’ …

… even though I found myself in the middle of nowhere with just the needle I used to knit the body of the pulli. It was way too long to comfortably knit the Hood. There is a small overlap area at the neckline which makes for a few tight rows even though you are knitting back and forth. It’s almost like knitting a funnel neck in the round which might be best worked with double points or a 16″ circular. My circular needle was, hmm, 32″ around?

Then I remembered something Nartian wrote: “What helped me was the tip Sandy (one of the Purlescence Yarns owners whose shop was hosting a Ribby Pulli KAL) gave about doing a big magic loop for a few rows…

So here’s my magic loop, neckline style. But what the heck does that really mean?! ;p

Well, wherever you encounter tightness, make the needle fit the knitting diameter by pulling out the excess cable at that point. Because it is a circular needle, it forms a loop that neatly folds up on itself. You can see how really ginourmous my needle was by how big the loop I ended up with!

But it really was MAGIC! I knit around the row comfortably and that loop never moved. It was positioned at the beginning of the row at the overlap point and there it stayed whether I was on the WS or RS.

I picked up the Hood stitches with the non-matching dyelot yarn I had. After about 3 inches, I started mingling in the other orginal dyelot yarn I had used for the body.

This works on my monitor but your mileage might vary…

You can see that the slightly greener yarn really blends in with the bluer yarn quite well! The whole thing was sitting in my lap while I was knitting away and I could not tell unless I really squinted.

And as they used to say on the KnitList about mistakes in knitting: “…if you can’t see it from a galloping horse, full speed ahead!”