July review

This is going to be a very short post because, as expected, I had very little free time in the month.

I have discovered that one of the joys of knitting is that unlike dressmaking it lends inself to working in short bursts - you can just pick it up and do a sneaky row or two if you have a few spare moments. Thus the body of my new Wondrella cardigan is complete. I decided to do the sleeves next, rather than the collar and bands. However, I picked up the stitches in a bit of a rush, and after I had knitted the first row I realised that I had picked some of them up in the wrong place.

The two stitches to the left of the marker were picked up too far in

There were more iffy stitches than just those two, and because I am that fussy, I decided that I needed to fix them all. However, I didn't want to take the whole thing out and have to space out and pick up 118 stitches again. So I undid the row of knitting, and then tried an experiment.

I transferred all the stitches to the right of the stitch marker, plus the two that were wrong, onto a length of scrap yarn. Then I took the leftmost stitch off the yarn, and pulled out the loop for the stitch, used a crochet hook to pull it back through in the correct place, and placed it back onto the needle. I did the same with the second stitch, and then returned all the other stitches on the holding yarn back onto needle.

All now in the right place

I suspect that this is nothing new to seasoned knitters, but I was very pleased that I had worked this out for myself. I'm used to (mostly) being able to fix sewing hiccups, but knitting is a whole new world. To be honest, it probably took longer to do it this way that if I had just frogged the sleeve and started again, but learning a new skill was far more satisfying.

More new skills await with my dress. I have got as far as sewing bodice darts and shoulder seams, and the next stage is the side seams and sleeves.

Progress so far

I went for the radical approach of actually looking at the instructions, and discovered that they differ slightly from the methods I used for the peppermint batik dress. Hopefully once we are into August I'll find some time to try them out.