Third Time’s a Charm
After getting my old bitch (the antique Gearhart Circular Sock Knitting Machine) to spit out an almost completed sock, I figured a second one would be easy.
It Wasn’t
No, of course not. I tried casting on a second sock using the same blue yarn as the first almost-sock. I went through all the same actions:
- Cast on waste yarn
- Loaded the first row of sock yarn
- Added ribbing needles
- Cranked out 34 rounds of 1×1 ribbing
- Moved half of the ribbing stitches to cylinder stitches
- Cranked out 43 rounds of 3×1 ribbing
- Disengaged the cylinder needles on the back half of the cylinder
- Parked the ribbing needles
- Removed the ribber plate
- FU%K!! – the first heel row dropped a couple of stitches and missed a shitload more
- Unraveled all the work and lost all interest in trying again!
Second attempt, I finished up until the fifth bullet point and then jammed the yarn in the ribber plate mechanism (FU%K again!). Lost any interest in trying again for another full day.
Finally on the third attempt, it went shockingly smoothly! I was able to finish the entire sock (including a machine turned toe in contrasting color yarn.
The manual toe is slightly different than the machine-turned toe. I was thinking that if I was going to have to hand-knit the toe on two socks, I might as well use a technique I like and that can’t be done on the machine. But I honestly don’t care much about the small difference…I love my new pair of socks.
Current Knitting
In addition to hand-finishing the toe on the first sock and machine-cranking and grafting the toe on the second sock, I also broke my Briyoke.
After getting up to about 12 inches on the body of the sweater, I noticed about 10 rows back there were three columns of stitches that I somehow screwed up. I tried dropping a column of stitches to see if I could recover without ripping back…turned into kind of a disaster.
After a few hours of ripping back and multiple rows, I was finally able to recover and start to re-grow the body of the sweater.
You can see I lost about three inches of knitting, but I couldn’t have lived with the errors, despite the fact that no one probably would have noticed.
Somehow, our “easy” fixes never work out thus giving us the joy (?) of two fixes. The socks are really cool—joy!
I always try easy fixes out first and sometimes I’m successful. With the Briyoke, I really would have needed a safety net to have recovered more easily.
The socks are beautiful.
Brioche and I don’t get along. I have to put in a lifeline every few rows in case of having to go back for correction. I have never been able to just work back at the point of the error. Congratulations of getting it all back on the needles and proceeding.
I have to admit after this last recovery, I did weigh the difficulty of using a lifeline versus how often I seem to make mistakes with brioche. It’s about equal in my estimation.