Kittens, this is my project for today.
For those of you who have been following me for at least 3 years, I bet it looks familiar. More than a year ago--maybe even two at this point--my mother told me that my brother's hat had formed a small hole on top and it looked like some of the stitches had wiggled loose. It sounded like the end had come loose and it was slowly unraveling, a fairly easy fix. It didn't help that he decided to wear it until the hole was large enough that his head was getting cold. When my mother and grandmother came to visit last month, she finally brought it down, and kittens, what I saw baffled me:
The end was still securely held in the last stitch, not woven in anymore, but not loose either. Random intervals of stitches, some 3-4 rounds down, had come undone. I looked at the long floats between loose stitches and couldn't find broken plies or anything other logical reason why this happened. After pondering the problem for awhile, I chalked it up to black magic. Magic most evil and foul.
I didn't have any black yarn to fix it at the time, so I stuck it away safely and put out an ISO request for a few yards so I could fix the hat. I decided not to worry about figuring it out until the yarn for it arrived. Two days ago that happened, and today I decided to tackle the hat project. So far it's taken more than an hour to get the stitches back onto needles and drop down 2 rounds. I'm still trying to make sense of what happened as well as remember back 3 years in time and figure out what my super unhelpful project notes mean. "This pattern must have errata somewhere…in the book it says one skein of each color will make the hat, I couldn’t get anywhere near the L size with one skein of the main color. The hat is a bit big on me, so hopefully, it will fit my brother."
Of course, I did not leave myself any sort of note as to how I altered the pattern to make the hat work with the amount of yarn I had...but I do vaguely recall having to cut a few rounds out of the hat and being irritated that it seemed short and squat. I'm hoping to find a row or two that I can clearly read and then rework the decrease rounds with a few more thrown in for more height.
And then I'm weaving in a good 6" tail so that sucker never comes loose again. This mending thing is the pits.
EDIT: Oh, even better, kittens. Now I AM finding sections where all but one plie is broken and can not be easily fixed. I'm going to mark them and partially felt the sections to try and give them some stability again. I think I'm going to knit my brother a new hat for his birthday or Giftmas this year.
3 comments:
Aww too bad on the hat! Good luck!
That hat is turning out very cool. It has thumbs up from my student too :) Thanks for sharing.
LOL I hadn't really read the post (my student wanted me to tell you it was cool) so now I'm sad the hat is self-destructing... You'll figure it out I am sure.
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