Mission: impossible

Well, look at that. It’s a wee mitten missing it’s cuff, which is doubly sad because that mitten totally had a cuff last night.

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I knew when I was casting on the mittens that there might not be enough yarn. I even asked Denny if she thought there would be enough yarn and she said (rather confidently) “No. That is not enough yarn.” I then rambled off things about small hands and little mittens and not putting much of a cuff and making them narrow and Denny looked at me and said “Still won’t work” and I said something about how I thought it would work but it would be close… and Denny looked at me, smiled and said “You can if you like”, and I knew then that I was hosed, but I started to knit anyway, because darn it, I do like to be right and there was a chance I was. Mittens are quick, so by about 10:30 I had a finished mitten, and trotted back to the scale to weigh the remaining yarn and the mitten itself. The mitten weighed more than the ball (although not by much. My victory was so close.) and if a mitten made from yarn weighs more than the yarn left to make another one, you are.. to put it poetically, entirely screwed. I felt badly about it for a second, Denny smirked about it for a minute, and then I dealt with it. This pictures is bad, but you can mostly see what I did.

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I snipped one tiny stitch above the cuff, and began to weasel that strand out of the work, revealing live stitches above the row I was removing, and below. When I had the whole row pulled out, I picked up those live stitches from the mitten part, and I’ll ravel the now detached cuff to give me enough yarn for the other mitten. Since someone will ask, the reason that I didn’t just unpick my cast on edge and ravel it that way, is because ribbing cannot be ravelled from the cast on direction. Something about the knit/purl combo means it absolutely doesn’t work. (I know there are some of you who won’t believe that and are going right now to knit a little swatch and try it, and I encourage that. It’s exactly what I did when someone told me it wouldn’t work. Go forth and test.)

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Now I’ve got a wee cuff I can ravel in the expected manner and also what’s left of the ball, and that’s enough (I weighed) to knit the second mitten. I just need to decide what I’ll make the cuff out of, and knit it downwards from those picked up stitches, and upwards for the other (nobody will be able to tell) and bingo. I’m once again grateful that I screw up enough to have developed a posse of skills to help me cope. The longer I knit the more I think that it’s not actually knitting well that matters (since I sort of don’t) but developing a wide range of skills to correct my rather impressive orbit of ways to arse knitting up.