I should have posted this yesterday, but I was working. So pretend this is yesterday and the exciting yarn-related stuff that happened today will appear later. Friday, er, today is hectic at the best of times because it's preparation for the weekend. I do the weekly food run, I try to vacuum some of the house, clean the bits we'll be seeing most of (the front room), that sort of thing. Plus cook a nice meal. Today I had to do all that plus get some help from the Geological Museum in Cambridge to identify a troublesome rock. This is a place I would normally go out of my way to AVOID on a busy day because geology eats my life even more effectively than yarn. I have spent hours staring thoughtfully at a rock face and today was no different. Perhaps it's something about Deep Time: I lost two hours instead of what felt like 10 minutes wandering around mumbling 'oooh' and 'aaaah' under my breath. I mean, they've got a mobile shaped like a giant anglerfish with a tiny school of prey fish suspended in front of it in what should be a state of permanent funk. But they seemed pretty relaxed, just spinning in the breeze; perhaps they knew the anglerfish had holes in its flanks. I'd have taken a picture, but my phone camera is rubbish, as revealed by this shot of my socks. Note that this animal (Iguanodon) would not have been able to knit. Perhaps if it had it would have been able to survive the KT boundary extinction wearing warm sweaters. If plant fibres were warm enough. If enough plants survived. OK, it was just a stupid joke.
The following sequence of photos showing how I corrected an error in Kiri might be more useful.
First I work to a point to one side of the error, then take the stitches above the error off the needle and pin them out nicely on the (well-lit) arm of our couch. To the left you see the mistake (a); to the right the next repeat down (b) is correct. The line of stitches in 'a' should have begun growing out of the central 'rib' further down. I don't know precisely what I did wrong (other than fail to pay attention to the work), but I'm going to try to correct it. So, what went wrong where? Comparing a and b, it seems that the base of the line of stitches should 'grow out of' the central rib in the gap just above the bottom-most red dash. Just compare the two bits of lace sitting in front of you stitch by stitch until you grasp the relationships. A crochet hook is useful to pull on threads to see where they come from/go to. The openwork to the left of the erroneous line are stitches and yarnovers; it's useful to think about how the structure pinned on the couch relates to what I actually did: 1. yarnover (right side); 2. purl (wrong side); 3. slip, knit, psso (right side), where step 3 unites the yarnover with the line of stitches to its right. The error/gap may have been created by incorrectly bringing a stitch based on a yarnover into that line; the two above the gap seem to come into the line rather close together. So I'll try bringing that stitch (the one currently in the gap between the 2nd and 3rd red dashes, counted from the bottom) into the next stitch down in the line. As it were. (This would be easier with more pictures. Maybe next time.)
Here I've carefully unravelled all the stitches that lead directly to the error. This includes some yarnovers, each pinned neatly at the point that the stitch from it was knitted into the line of stitches containing the mistake.
Using what I've learned about how the yarnover stitches are constructed and brought into the line, I've moved one down as discussed above. Now I'm just working my way back up the line of stitches, bringing the other yarnovers in to the line in turn. The end result is not perfect, but a bit of tweaking will improve the stitch spacing and blocking will make it even better. Now, another repeat into the pattern, I can't find this repair myself.
2 comments:
I would never, ever have attempted that. I would have tinked back the whole thing or ripped it in a fit of temper. Or cried. I'm very impressed. What a good idea, pinning it down like that. I suppose you don't have to worry about it all getting out of control if you pin it.
You stared at a rock for 2 hours? Rock meditation. Hmmmm. Can you tell a rock's type just by looking? Don't you have to hack it to pieces first?
My husband seems to think I'm a bit of a control freak and this is more evidence to support his case :-) Seriously, it works. Pinning it down, stretched means it can't get away, you've got a really good chance of working out what went wrong where, and you always have the option of tinking or ripping if you can't work it out or the repair looks worse than the mistake. If you're going to have to rip back to a lifeline you lose nothing by trying this -- that repair and photos thereof took well under 1/2 hour.
The person who painted those watercolours has patience and talent enough for this. Believe it, or better, believe in yourself!
If you're good you can almost always identify a rock just by looking if you're familiar with the area it came from, although it's best to have a clean freshly-broken surface to examine (wind, water and chemical action alter older surfaces so it's more difficult). I'm just an amateur, not good enough for that. If I had more time, like another lifetime, I'd be a professional geologist. I was going to do something via the OU in this life, but yarn is currently eating all my spare time.
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