Friday, October 20, 2006

Twist and shout

What is this, you ask? Some sort of mutant lingere? A cute, fuzzy upside down heart? Perhaps the start of a very large, yet to be felted pirate hat? Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner here. I managed to twist 150 stitches and somehow not notice this fact until I had knit the first ten rows...twice. Dan asked for off white "fluffy stuff" at the edge, so I oblidged and bought some Fun Fur and cast on. Got into the non fluffy part of the pattern and started to worry that the fringe would be too thin, so I quickly knitted up a sample and felted it. Yep, way too thin. Frogged the whole mess and began again, this time carrying three strands instead of two. Perfect. Sigh. Oh, wait, something's wrong here....
I flat out refused to rip out all of this AGAIN and set it aside overnight, glaring at the fun fur as I stowed it in a dark corner. Bad yarn. No donut for you.

But wait. I have a sewing machine. I could steek this sucker! People steek every day and come out completely unscathed and sane. This was going to get felted anyway, so nothing should show in the end. If worse came to worse, I'd just have to start over. Nothing to lose. So I gritted my teeth and started to sew. Sewing is easy. I do that all the time.
But what about the cutting??? Please excuse the blurriness of this picture. I believe my hands were shaking just a wee bit. Nerves. Cutting knitted yarn on purpose just seems so....wrong, so horrible, I had a hard time keeping my hand still.

Well, there's no turning back now, is there?
I untwisted the yarn, grabbed a needle and black thread, and whipstitched the ends back together. You can just barely see where the ends meet in the middle of the picture above. Not a chance it'll show once everything is felted. And now I have technically steeked, albeit not exactly on purpose. I've steeked and lived to tell the tale and didn't have to frog over a thousand stitches. Nice.