Steel Kitten

Merry Christmas!

Where did the last few weeks go?!

Sorry for not being around...all I've done is work and knit with precious little time for anything else, but sadly I did too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

I wasn't able to finish Martin's jumper - I'm halfway up the second sleeve with not much further to go, but I decided to 'give' him his present this evening so I could offer up the first sleeve and if it fitted finish the second in a concerted couple of hours and make it all up. Sadly it was just as well as I fessed up this evening, because after I offered up the sleeve I realised it was waaaayyy too long and I need to frog it back and lose at least two, probably three inches. 

So perhaps it wasn't such a bad thing to not finish. It would have been heartbreaking to have done all this work, sewn it up and then have to undo it all. At least I can get a decent finish on it now. 

Anyway, tomorrow I'm doing a simple turkey-based roast for us and hubby's parents, then on Boxing Day a roast beef lunch for eight with my family. As of 6pm tonight, everything that needs preparing for the two days is done. I have two trifles in the fridge - a sherry one and a cointreau chocolate orange one - just waiting for their respective vanilla and chocolate custards to go on top. There's two lots of red cabbage, a whacking great portion of Marie Rose sauce for prawn cocktails, around 40 pigs in blankets and then part of my niece's boxing day lunch so the flavours could mingle and develop for a while. 

Having a vegetarian niece is one thing, having a vegetarian niece with a peanut allergy is quite another. The shops are useless  when it comes to this sort of thing - everything revolves around nuts - so you really have no choice but to make something yourself under the circumstances. So I plumped for a greek spanakopita - spinach and feta filo pie using this recipe. Originally I was going to do Jamie Oliver's recipe without the pinenuts, but luckily I read through it first right to the end and realised that he's done something that almost all professonial chefs do - they forget we mere mortals do not generally have professional equipment. His recipe requires me to use a pan on the hob for a while and then put that straight into the oven to further cook the pie. That's fine if you have completely metal pan from top to bottom. I have what most people have - a teflon pan with plastic handle. So that recipe and way of cooking it was out and I searched until I found another. I think this one will be a lot tastier too as there is more varieties of cheese to give it greater depth. And of course, I'll sort out a separate pan of stuffing, tatties and veg for her without any animal fat. 

So, Merry Christmas one and all, I hope you have a wonderful, relaxing and peaceful few days.

I'm going back to my port, Morecombe and Wise and knitting by the open fire, and I'll be back in a few days, hopefully with a finished jumper to show you!!

And it all went wrong. Then right.

 It was going so swimmingly.

I was three quarters of the way up the front of the jumper by Friday evening. I was going great guns. Before me lay the possibility of having a sleeve almost done by tonight. Life was good.

Then I was supping a cup of tea and had a sudden thought "That first piece of rib looks very deep. I don't remember it looking as deep as that when I did the back". I pulled the back out to check. My heart stopped. I was only supposed to do 10 rows of rib for the base of the jumper. I had absent-mindedly done around 25.

I was facing the possibility of frogging around 50cms of knitting to get it back to what it should be.

The back with the correct amount of rib. It has that slight curve at each side which gives the bottom shape while it's being worn

I just couldn't face it.

Instead I did something I'd never done before as a first and last ditch attempt to prevent me having to frog everything. With a crochet needle I upicked the rib from the bottom upwards, starting with the cast on stitches and working my way though the 15 superfluous rows. It's not the same frogging forwards as backwards - the wool is literally wrapped around each stich and you have to carefully loosen it first and then draw it through. Each stitch needs to have the wool drawn through it twice.

But....I did it!! Then I faced the task of casting off the stitches, but I knew it would have to be in a loose enough stitch that the jumper edge wouldn't be too tight. I searched for and found a great cast off stitch tutorial here that you would use for casting off sweaters that have been knitted top down. I used Version B: Knitting through the front loops. And it worked.

When you compare the front and back you can see a difference. The back is obviously much more tapered due to the natural shape of the rib, while the front is now more stretched out, but what I will do is unpick the row of cast on stitches on the back and then cast off the same way to get them to match up.

 

The front as it is after casting off. You can see it's a lot looser without so much elastic spring than the back rib

In the end I only had to frog back to the point where I would have begun to shape the sleeves and knitted on a few more centimetres of stocking stitch otherwise the body would have been too short.

Back rib with normal casting on stitches. Slightly curly on the edges.

Front rib with casting off stitches. No curl and quite flat.

I can't tell you how relieved I am that I managed to avert that disaster.