Did you ever make a sweater that you were absolutely in love with, both the yarn and the pattern and, when you were sewing it together, discovered a mistake so enormous that you could not ignore it?
I knit myself a really lovely cardigan in a beautiful yarn this last couple of weeks. I joined the shoulders with a three needle bind off, knit the band around the front and neck and sewed in the sleeves. I pinned the sides together for seaming and, much to my great distress and using every curse word that I know, I found that I had repeated the first lace pattern at the beginning (bottom) of the back piece twice and only once on the fronts. I got ready to toss it into the garbage or at least a corner to gather dust but I just liked it too much to not try to repair it.
I have removed the bottom of a sweater before and reknit it down to increase the length but only in stocking stitch and never with this pretty a yarn. I gathered my courage and here’s what I did. I left the sweater sewn as far as I had gone because who wants to undo hand sewn sweater seams. That almost never works out for me.
I used a contrast colour in a pale yellow so that I could still see it but not have any bright or dark fibres left when I removed it and, picking up one side of every stitch, threaded a life line through my knit stitches two rows above the last lace repeat that I wanted to keep. I then place two life lines one row apart on the two rows below the first row of garter stitch that bordered the lace pattern.
Next, I took a very deep breath and cut between the life lines. Yes, I cut the bottom of the back off. Working on the bottom piece, I picked out all of the little bits from cutting and, carefully ripped back to a couple of rows above my life line. I picked up the stitches with a circular needle, made sure that my count was correct and unknit back to the last knit row that ended the one lace repeat that I should have stopped at the first time around. I used a contrast waste yarn and worked two rows in stocking stitch then cast off to hold all of the stitches securely.
Putting that piece aside, I then used my circular needle and picked up one side of the bottom loop of each stitch between the two life lines on the top piece of the back. I used two life lines here as I wasn’t sure how the loops would hold when I picked up the bottom of each stitch. I then ripped back to the needle, used waste yarn and worked the same two rows of stocking stitch and cast off.
Now, to put the two pieces back together, I worked from the wrong side with a really long length of yarn (because I didn’t want to have to try to join in the middle) and grafted the loops from the bottom to the loops from the top piece. I checked to make sure that all of the stitches were included and ripped out the waste yarn from both pieces.
Success! My lovely sweater knit with the lovely yarn was now repaired and the fronts matched the back.
