Saturday 26 January 2008

7 tinks on a Friday night

I don't know why, but I've always liked the number 7. I don't have the number anywhere in my date of birth and I've never lived at house number 7. Maybe it's just a comfortable familiar number, there being 7 days in the week. Maybe it's to do with the number supposedly being the amount of things we can remember readily. I don't know.

So what's this got to do with knitting? Well as I was working on the front neck and armhole decreases on the Twister tonight (whilst watching Jonathan Ross on TV - great show!) I realised that each side seemed to be pretty close to the number of stitches I needed for the shoulders. Which was a bit odd as I still had another 20-odd decrease rows left to do.

That's when I checked my decrease notes. (I had noted down each row number with a mark for the neck/armhole decrease where required right up to the shoulder shaping - its' the only way I can keep track when the decreases are at different rates). Of course I should have checked them when I first wrote them down, but hindsight is a wonderful thing, right?

It came as no surprise to find that I'd carried on the armhole decreases way further than I should have done in my notes, and I needed to undo 7 (there's that number again!) rows of work on both sides of the front. Thankfully they were only rows of 30-odd stitches each side.

Of course it was irksome to undo what I had spent time creating, and to be regressing rather than going forwards. But as I worked the slow, deliberate tinking movements, I realised that it was actually quite satisfying. I wasn't going to fudge around the problem and always know it was there, even if others didn't notice. I was carefully peeling it back to the point where I could make the error disappear. Magically erased. Vanished.

Now the offending 7 rows of decreases have gone. The shaping is as it should be. The problem never existed. :-)

Oh and Della - my confidence is slowly growing that I will have enough yarn left for the remaining sleeve. But I've still got my fingers crossed.

1 comment:

MandellaUK said...

How much worse it could have been. 14 rows, 21, 28 ...

Twister is going to be really special. You're lavishig so much time, love and attention on it. Even the yarn is something out of the ordinary. If knitting karma runs true it'll be a favourite for years.