Leap of faith

Last spring I spent a lot of time knitting in the dark. I had a family member who was dying, and I was often called late at night by the nursing staff to come and sit with her when things looked bleak.

I typically brought my knitting so I would have something to keep me occupied during the hours I sat with her in the dark. I would bring small projects I could knit in the round - things that didn't require much light or much concentration. I started experimenting with cables - started with a few hats and then decided to try a small sweater using Elizabeth Zimmermann's percentage system.

My sister was pregnant with her first child during this same time, but she had not found out the sex of the baby. I wanted to make something gender-neutral, and I had a few skeins of Plymouth Encore in a soft celery color that would be perfect. I thought I'd make a basic sweater with one fat cable running up the center front. So, I cast on and worked on it during my visits.

The problem with working in the dark.....is that you can't really see what you're doing. The sweater flew off my needles, but when I sat down to actually look at my work in the daylight I noticed that I had not been paying proper attention to my cabling!

Something about the random wandering of the cable made me smile - as if it were a wayward toddler that just felt like going it's own way. But when I was honest with myself I knew that I couldn't bear to leave it the way it was. I had a rough idea of what needed to be done - pulling out the mis-cable stitches and re-cabling them - but I had no idea how to do it.

So, I let it lay for nearly a year before I worked up the nerve to figure it out. Life went on - my loved one died in June, just three days before my sister's baby was born. I continued knitting other projects, but all the while the bad cable on this sweater was nagging at the back of my mind.

I finally just googled a bunch of terms "fixing bad cables knitting" "fixing miscrossed cables", etc., until I found just the help I needed: a blogger who had given a step-by-step tutorial on this very subject!

I printed out her instructions and sat down with my scissors, warily eyeing the crazily snaking cable. Was I really going to cut through my knitting?


Yup.

Once the cuts were made and the threads pulled, kitchenering it up was actually the easy part. Not saying it didn't take me another six weeks to actually get up the courage to *try* it, just that once I did try it I was amazed at how quickly and easily I was able to finish it.

(Side note: is it just me, or does kitchener stitch have what could quite possibly be the worst reputation of all knitting techniques?)

The sweater is still not a vision of perfection. I didn't take into account the fact that cables pull inward, so I probably should have cast on another 8 or 12 stitches when I began. The neckline is just mediocre - I was knitting largely in the dark, after all, and just knit a few rows straight up after I completed the decreases. I had been aiming for a simple rolled collar, but the cabling makes it look a little wavy.

Overall, though, I'm happy with it. It reminds me of good things. It makes me think of family, and of being there when I am needed. And it helps me remember that, when it comes to knitting, I can be fearless and try anything. It just takes a leap of faith.