What might have been

[elizabeth_mn]

Sigh.  So I was making this hat for my HB's birthday at the end of the month. I started this (well, sketching for it, anyway) way back in December.  About a million swatches later, I cast on, and I spent at least of month's worth of naptimes knitting that seeded cable edging.  The plan was to have plain stockinette above the cabled part and a simple, fitted round top.



I had gotten about an inch of the plain stockinette portion done when I decided I had better measure and see how it was going.  I knew that my cast-on edge was a bit loose, as in, it looked like a giant ruffle unless it was pulled snugly.  "But that's okay," I thought, "because the hat has 2 inches of negative ease to hug the head.  I measured his head and I made all those swatches!"

You probably know where this is going.  The circumference of the hat was FIVE inches too large.  The CO looseness was no longer a problem.  The hat coming anywhere remotely close to fitting was.

Did I mention I was making this in fingering-weight cotton?  On size 2 needles?  And that it was supposed to be a surprise b-day gift?

So, after moping about it for a little while (and measuring it over and over in the hopes it would somehow shrink) I decided I should just admit defeat and rip everything out.

But first, I showed the thing to my husband, so he could know why he's not getting a handmade birthday gift from me this year.  Of coure, he tried to talk me out of ripping it out, and he even wanted to try it on.  The sad part was, the bottom of the hat didn't look ridiculously crappy on his head, so I couldn't even laugh at it.  Just crappy enough to make me hate it.

Anyway, it might not have looked too bad, I might have been able to fix it with blocking, etc. etc., but I'll never know because I ripped it all out.  And then I cried a little.  (Maybe I get a little too emotional about my knitting.)  Maybe I'll re-knit it some other time, who knows.  But I'll probably just do a plain seed stitch edging because the cabled edging really didn't want to lie flat.

Comments

[quincy134.livejournal.com]

I'm so sorry! I feel your pain, as I've done that too, and I've done that with large things like sweaters. Although swatching is important, it's not an exact science. Your tension can change over time, especially over the course of long projects. But you did the right thing to tear it out. In order to finish the project, you would have had to work a lot more, and then fight through a fickle blocking process. And then you'd always look at the project thinking something was wrong with it. This way you save yourself the long-term grief, although you get a lot of grief right now from having to frog. I've gotten to the end of making a sweater, seamed everything up, and realized that I should've just frogged something when I noticed something was rong. Then I end up tearing out the whole sweater.

[ashamanja-babu.livejournal.com]

Oh, ripping out a whole sweater would really be tragic! Thanks for telling me I did the right thing. I know I would never have been satisfied with it if I had tried to finish it.