Learning experience: the problem

I thought I'd try to show you what was wrong. I don't have photoshop, so I can't easily generate images with words overlaid, but I'll try to describe what is going on.

The root of the problem was, as I said yesterday, that I had let floats run from one row to another at the steek. Unfortunately, I couldn't photograph it (and at the time I was taking the picture below, I didn't know that there was a problem, yet).

The picture above is of the little kangaroo-pouch that one gets where a neck steek is born. Before the neck shaping, there is a whole torso worth of stitches and then after, there is only the shoulders (plus steek) so at the break there is a bit of extra fabric sticking out. I don't know how clear it is (because it is as clear as day in my pained memory) but there are two little holes on either side of the big kangaroo pouch. Those were formed by the cast-off (I was actually not casting off, just putting the stitches on a bit of scrap yarn) stitches after the first row (which makes the pouch). And there are floats from the edges of the pouch to to the tops of the holes, which then need to be cut to free up the cast-offs for the neck.

I did, indeed cut them. That's how steeking works. You steel yourself and then you take a pair of scissors to your work. You do this even though you know that it's only the stitches next to, above and below that are holding each stitch together.

The above picture shows things as they were just after I cut. I still had the "cast-off" stitches on their stitch holder, and you can see where there is a short stretch of white yarn where the first cast off row ends and the second begins. The big trouble is that there is a cut float that ran where that little stretch of white yarn was.

Those floats had no possibility for reinforcement. I had broken the steeking rule and there was no recovering. I had cut yarn and now stitches were starting to vanish, willy-nilly. And they were important stitches. Ones I really needed to make the neckline were popping out of existence.

It was bad news. By the time I took the picture above, I knew the jig was up. I'd have to pick all the way back to the start of the neck shaping. I'd cut every one of those strands, so it wasn't recoverable. I needed to junk all of that yarn (that jugful of short scraps) and start again at the neck shaping. I'd need to re-design the neck so that it didn't have the float problem (by decreasing rather than casting off) and then I'd need to re-knit all the way back to the shoulder. Then I'd need to re-make the shoulder seam.

After doing all of that, I'd need to steel myself, take a pair of scissors, and cut through the yarn. I knew it was going to be hard. I knew that, having learned a hard lesson, I was going to dread it.

But I also knew that this whole sweater is meant to be a learning experience. It's meant to be a learning experience even more so than in the usual way that everything we do is a learning experience. I knew I'd be making mistakes and wanting to fix things. So, that's what I did.