The Archilles Heel on my Hat!!

Last week I thoroughly enjoyed reading a blog post by my lovely friend Laurie entitled "Going through a Phase".  In her knitting post Laurie wrote about issues with Noro Blankie and the resulting fall-out they had to work through.

I commented to her that I had a similar experience with my China Blue Andean Hat.  I'd knit it up super fast, blocked and dried it, photographed it and posted pictures on Ravelry.  As I was admiring my hat, my husband happened along and laughed at the grumpy face Andean pattern.  Hmm...I hadn't noticed it whilst knitting.  We joked that I should rename my hat accordingly.

Later that day, I excitedly cast on the matching China Blue Andean Mittens.  I knit them up super fast too since the stranded pattern is only twenty rows and quite easy.  Once the Andean pattern was complete, I admired the stranded work, but just couldn't see the grumpy face in the pattern.

UH OH......

Yup, you guessed it!  There was a grumpy face on the Andean hat because I'd mistakenly omitted a row of the pattern!  And not just any row either.  It was row 3 of course.....right at the beginning of the chart and the hat.

What to do?  Rip and re-knit?  I figured there had to be another way.  Frogging the entire hat seemed the very long way around the error.....as well as being VERY annoying.

So I thought I'd be clever.  Yes, I know what you're all thinking.......  wipe those smirks of your faces!

Here's what the erroneous hat looked like:

Andean Hat - Mark I

See the first orange/yellow stripe at the brim?  Well, just above that - the fourth row of the pattern looks like a grumpy smile.  See it?  It's where I didn't close the blue box pattern.

So what I did was to snip the blue yarn above the Andean pattern and unravel one row.  This left me with two pieces - the blue crown to the left of me, and the stranded body to the right.  The blue crown had a long squiggley bit of yarn attached to it.....that was the row I'd unravelled.

I then ripped back the stranded work and re-knit the pattern properly.  Worked brilliantly!

I carefully slipped all 98 stitches from the crown piece onto two needles being certain not to twist the stitches.

This is where I think I made the mistake.  Instead of snipping off the squiggley bit of blue yarn (where I unravelled the crown from the body) I decided to knit one more crown round so as not to waste the yarn.

I then proceeded to graft the two pieces together.  It coulda worked!  And it did actually, except I had a row of twisted stitches!  And the join was of course very noticeable.

Where did I go wrong?  I should NOT have knit the extra round on the crown.  In hindsight, I knit that row from the top down.....whereas the body of the hat was knit from the bottom up.  So of course the stitches would be twisted!!  DOH!

Lesson learned - the hard way as usual - as all good lessons are.

Darn this hat.  There was nothing left to do but rip the crown back and re-knit it.  I figured it would be faster than undoing the grafting and that extra row I knit on the crown.

I present to you the correct version of the Andean Hat:

Andean Hat - Mark II

And YES to those who I'd spoken with.....the uneven knitting from the squiggley yarn blocked out without too much effort!