Un-Braid-It

I did my first big fix on the train ride up to BWI on Friday and was surprised how easy it was (once I overcame the terror of ripping out in the middle of my knitting). Now that I think about it, though, it really shouldn't be scary: you're either going to always see the mistake and hate the piece, or end up ripping out the whole thing anyway, so why not try a fix?

My problem was a result of the "make it up as you go" method. It's a technique sometimes praised in the knitting world, but as a practitioner, I can definitely attest to the fact that it results in as many frogs as interesting and unique pieces. I'm working on a cotton halter, from the top down (think raglan without the sleeve part) and when I connected it in the back, I thought I'd try a braid. Aside from the yo increase holes, the whole thing was just stockinette...kinda boring. I thought a braid down the back might spice it up a bit. Instead it started to look like a knobby twisted spine protruding from the back. Not quite the look I was going for. Soo..... I took the stitches in question off the needles:

Then slowly and meticulously ripped out the rows below the exposed stitches. (scaaaary) And it ends up looking something like this, with all of the extra yarn to make your new connector rows with and the last row of active stitches:

Then I picked up those active stitches on my needle and used the hanging yarn at each row to knit the stitches back into place - filling in the big hole of where I had ripped out. Tada...it's fixed!

I was on a train, making it difficult to take too many step-by-step pictures (sometimes I forget that the general population is not in the same craft-document-blog mentality, resulting in a lot of strange looks and inquiries). But I imagine it's one of those things that you have to just fiddle around with and make it work in your own way, made much easier when you are comfortable with the anatomy of a stitch.

In Other News.

As you may have guessed, I'm back home in the D of C after my weekend adventure in New Hampshire. I've downloaded my camera but spent all of my dedicated blog time last night on backing up my computer and dumping another 5000 pictures off my poor laptop onto the external drive. Some of the NH pics are up on flickr, patiently awaiting a post.

I'm happy to say that despite our best efforts, we did not place last at Pub Quiz last night. Even with missing the first round and turning in the matching round (which stars are in which constellations? are you kidding me?) with no correct answers but the bonus question, there somehow was another team still worse than us. Though still a good time, the event is definitely lacking with the absence of Tommy and Steffi.