twinset.us

Dear Jan,

Slicing a sweater in half is serious business, and I’m sure Karen thought leaving an incision open for several weeks was far too long, but finally we’ve sutured everything back up and the patient is doing very well.

At the beginning of the operation, I first had to tink back a row to get the right pattern going for the Kitchener graft.  Not a challenge - I just didn’t check to see where I’d separated.  I decided to take advantage of this and use the unraveled yarn for the graft.  Unfortunately, right about at this point, I figured out I’d made some errors already (over-confident!) and rather than unravel that long yarn, just cut it.

Before I had to reopen the wound, I did figure out a slick technique to prevent my very long yarn from getting fuzzy from pulling through so many stitches.  Before pulling on the yarn, I stretched it between pinched fingers.  This effectively narrowed the diameter of the yarn, letting it slip through the stitches with much greater ease.  It also prevented the twist from being pushed along the yarn from the friction, which always leaves you with yarn twining back on itself and is quite a bother.  The three pictures here show this technique in progress - 1) pinch, 2) use the left hand to pull while maintaining tension with the right, 3) ready to reposition hands.  It turned out that the Sylvan Spirit yarn I’m using was tough enough I didn’t need to do this with the shorter lengths I ended up using, but for a soft yarn this technique could be useful for even fairly short strands.

I got half of the graft completed yesterday,

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and the remainder today.

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I am so much happier with the new patterning - old pattern then new pattern shown.  No contest.

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and the fit is still working, too.

On to the neck and sleeves!

Happy remainder of your Thanksgiving weekend to you.

Love,

Ellen