Bloody Hindsight

I've sort of forgotten what I finished after those four disasters, so instead of past FO reports you get current knitting progress. I'm not going to show you all of my WIPs, because that's a level of embarassment I'm saving for another entry, but you can see my current favourite project.



This is the Embellished V-Neck from VK Fall 2006. I've loved this pattern from first sight, as is usually the case with me, but was so busy with holiday gifts at the time that all I got to do was buy yarn for it (Wool-Ease. Nothing special.) and make a little swatch. A couple of weeks ago I fetl the urge to start it, so I quickly freed my US 7 circ from the potentially disastrous lace v-neck I'm also not quite done with and read through the pattern. It was somewhere around the sleeve instructions that I noticed the lack of a hem anywhere in the pattern. The entire thing is knit in St st from the cast-on upwards, with nothing whatsoever standing between the edge and a massive amount of curling. Looking at the pattern picture confirmed it, but luckily for me I had recently read something about tubular hems. An hour later, I had knit 12 St st rows with a purled turning ridge in their midst, folded up the bottom half of the hem, and k2togethered across the whole thing. Lovely!

It was only much later, after I'd done all four hems and started seaming things together, that I read something else about tubular hems. Apparently the rows of St st before the turning ridge are supposed to be worked with a smaller needle, and I immediately understood why.



You see how my hem flips up like that? If I'd knit the first six rows with a US5 instead of a US7 the slightly greater tension of the fabric would have held the hem flat, but as it stands now, the only way that's going to get fixed is if I painstakingly snip and unravel, stitch by stitch, my entire lovely hem and reknit it. Fortunately, because the portion I have to reknit won't be seen, I can knit it down from the turning ridge and it won't matter that it's obviously going the wrong way. Unfortunately, I am very, very bad at tacking down hems and am all sorts of worried that I'm going to end up with something inflexible and ugly in place of my almost-perfect expanse of cleverly joined stockinette.