Two Steps Back

Or, in my case, two sleeves back. Sigh... At least I'm not alone in having to rip back recently. Yesterday was a classic case of one step forward, two steps back.


I spent yesterday afternoon figuring out the sleeve instructions for my Mirage sweater. I was glad that I already had the mock-cable pattern most of the way memorized. Even with the advantage of familiarity with the chart, I realized very quickly that I didn't want to be messing with DPNs any longer than I had to on these sleeves. So I made a special Sunday afternoon trip to Kirkwood Knittery for 16 inch size 7 needles. I worked into the evening & knit both sleeves up past the point of being able to switch onto circular needles. I was very pleased with my progress & feeling pretty proud of myself until I took a look at the body of the sweater. Something didn't look right. The needles looked smaller. ARGH! The needle for the body of the sweater is a size 6. I'd been using the wrong size. No way to fix it except ripping out, unfortunately.

Because I'd gone down a size (I thought) on the garter stitch cuffs, & knit them with size 6 DPNs, I did manage to salvage one cuff. The other one had a funky twisted part in one section of the cast on, which I discovered Sunday evening after that sleeve was off the DPNs & onto a size 7 circular needle. I was just going to leave it until I realized that my issue was much bigger than a small glitch in the cast on. Once my mistake was evident, however, I decided to go ahead & start that sleeve over completely since I was ripping back anyway.

Fortunately I already had a size 6 circular needle, but unfortunately, not enough DPNs. So I ended up making a trip to Chris' Needlecraft on my lunch hour for even more needles. Hopefully by I'll manage to have the sleeves back onto circular needles in time for knit night this week.