When I last mentioned my brown sweater it was April, 2008. At that time I had finally finished it and sewed it together only to discover the sleeves hung down to my finger-tips. Since the sleeves were knit from the ribbing up, I was not sure what to do. Because I had other things to make the sweater got placed in a bag and "forgotten" until the lady who gave me the pattern asked about my progress. When I told her of my problem she said it would be easy to fix.
She told me to cut one of the stitches on the edge of the sleeve and pull that piece of cut yarn all the way across the sleeve. She assured me the old ribbing would come off the rest of the sweater and I would then have live stitches at the new bottom of the sleeve where I could attach new yarn and knit the ribbed cuff. According to her, I could even reuse the yarn that was part of the old ribbing.
I believed her because she showed me with a sample piece that it was possible. I did not feel brave enough to try it on my own. So eventually our schedules meshed. Within an hour both sleeves were on circular needles ready to have a new cuff knit. It did not take many days after that before the ribbing was finished to a more comfortable and usable length.
It has been nice to wear this sweater on those cool spring days when a coat is too warm.
More than a year ago I tried to net a shrug. The biggest problem with this project was that I ran out of yarn and could not find any more in the local stores. I was not even sure what yarn it was. Thanks to the Internet I not only figured out what yarn I had used, but was also able to order another skein of Red Heart's Light and Lofty #9261 (Citrus).
Then the shrug sat because I was trying to decide what to do. No, that's wrong. I knew what I had to do, I just had to psych myself into the right frame of mind to do it. One sleeve was tighter than the other one and both were tighter than I really wanted. That meant I had to undo all the knots I had tied around the body of the shrug and both sleeves. I had to undo enough knots to bring it back to when it was just a rectangle.
Eventually I untied the knots and made the rectangle several rows longer. Then I redid the sleeves and the body of the shrug below the sleeves. This past month I finally finished it. I love to wear it. It was worth the few hours spent untying those hundreds of knots. I am surprised how warm it keeps me even with all those holes.
