Needles on the Move

Part way through the yoke of my Tangled Yoke I tried it on and made the mindblowing discovery that I had somehow managed to knit the body about 3 inches longer than it needed to be. The yoke was fitting nicely though, and there was no way I was ripping out all that cabling, so I put ‘fixing the body’ on the back burner and finished off the top.

I tossed up a few possibilities: Chop some off the bottom? Cut the middle out and graft the ribbing back on? Rip out the entire body? Ugh. Chopping the bottom off took away too much of the ribbing so I ditched that idea pretty quickly, but I was hankering after option 2 for a while (lazy) until I finished the neckband and did a final try-on.

It was clearly evident that the weight I’ve lost since I started my training was also going to come into play here, I was not happy with the extra ease around the waist, I really preferred the very fitted look I’d seen on some projects on Rav, so I bit the bullet and went for the big chop.

I hope you never find yourself having to cut off a bottom-up sweater at the underarms and re-knit downwards, but just in case you do, I have recorded the process here for posterity.

1. Using a much smaller needle, pick up one leg of every stitch of one row all the way around. Be REALLY careful that it’s all the same row. Triple-check it. Do it sober and in good daylight.

2. Take your embroidery scissors (and a gulp of wine if necessary), and snip stitches in the next row to the picked up stitches. In this case, the row below, as I’m planning to head downwards. Felted Tweed is pretty sticky, so I snipped stitches about 3 inches apart. A smoother yarn will pull out more easily and you won’t need to cut so many.

3. Give the knitting a tug and make a hole, you can see that the stitches you want are safely sitting on the needle. Don’t cut too close to the edges - you will need a tail of yarn to darn in once you’ve started knitting again.

4. Use a big blunt darning needle to pick out the stitches all the way across.

5. Have another glass of wine.

I’m now ready to start knitting down, adding a little more shaping and probably not increasing quite so much at the bottom, as my hips are narrower than my bust. There will be a little jump at the edges when I come to pick up for the button bands, as the stitches now go the opposite way, but I’ll deal with that when I come to it.

Remember! This does not work for ribbing. You can only knit seamlessly in the other direction in stocking stitch. If you wanted to do this to ribbing, knit the new piece up from the bottom and then graft it onto the picked up stitches - they’ll match up perfectly.

It wasn’t that bad, really ;-)

Many things have happened since I last posted here, well that wouldn’t be hard given how long it’s been - sorry!

I have had intensive Pilates training through August and still pretty busy now, we had 13 tuition days in central London and plenty of homework in between. Tuition was followed by the Practical Assessment exam which I sat last Friday, basically to check that I’m safe to launch on the public for supervised teaching. I passed, so I must be, and I have done a couple of hours already this week, I have to do 50 hours more or less and then be signed off in an exam situation.

Practice teaching in Pilates is (perhaps not suprisingly) quite like practice teaching in schools, but with less yelling. I am rediscovering my voice projection, and my ability to scan a room for people doing what they shouldn’t. All I’ve had to do is adjust from ‘is anyone drawing on the walls’ to ‘is anyone losing the alignment of their lower back’. I’m really enjoying it and feedback from my supervisors has been positive so far.

Today, I’ve been swotting for the written exam, which I have next Wednesday afternoon. Questions range from e.g. ‘Name three exercises for mobilising the spine’ (easy) to ‘Name six deep hip muscles which rotate the thigh’ (ugh - hard to spell) and ‘Explain the importance of core stability and how you would teach it to a new client’ (lots of marks there). I think I’m going to be fine, I’ve been studying steadily on all this stuff since May and now is really just revision.

In the meantime, I have been knitting quite a lot, and spinning a little. Spinning is harder on my back, and I really need a better chair, but I’m fine for short bursts. This week I’ve been working on the newest SOFA club fibre and have knitted a project already (no spoilers!). It’ll be out early next week. I’ve nearly finished my Tangled Yoke Cardigan, it’s at that point where it’s so close to done that I don’t want to knit anything else so it’s getting lots of attention. It looks a little bigger than this:

I really just want to finish it so I can start the next jumper, inspired by this, which at the moment looks something like this:

I have allowed time though for the odd baby bootie as well, since apparantly everyone is falling pregnant at the moment! (Not me.)

This post has been rather light on pictures, so I’ll dig out a couple that I somehow missed blogging about, from our trip to the Peak District in July

This is Neil atop a very large hill,  this was a great walk, lovely views and the only day of our trip on which it didn’t pour with rain!

And here’s an example of the roads we drove around the whole time, around the area close to our cottage. A bit hairy at times, particularly when there were stone walls either side!

We are heading to Yorkshire next weekend to visit friends, and also hoping to squeeze in a trip to New York in October. Things depend a little on Neil’s work, and we’re just waiting to see.

Ciao! xx