I spent two hours yesterday fighting with the left FIL mitt cap, trying to figure out how to graft the damned thing closed, but I just couldn’t see what was happening while the stitches were on the needles. I must have started grafting and pulled out the first three (of only 8, FFS) pairs of stitches four times before I gave up on trying to do it with the needles in the way.
There had to be a better way. Surely. So I got creative.
To keep the stitches from twisting around, to prevent them from laddering down (unlikely with Noro, BTW) and to provide a visual contrast, I threaded a thin strand of yellow yarn through each side separately, then tried the grafting thing again.
It went better that time, although it still took three tries to get to the end of the row. Then I had to adjust the tension on the graft, so I could feel like my stitches looked like real stitches, if you know what I mean. By now, the yarn was getting fuzzy and I was afraid to keep dicking with it.
Still, it didn’t look right, but I was so tired and I had to go to bed, so I put it all away. Then I lay in bed and tried to figure out how to fix it again, ’cause the purl stitches in the middle of the row (one in front, one in back) made the fabric dip down in the center, like in this picture:
Um, yeah, that's not quite right.
Ignore the wonky lie of the stitches elsewhere. They’ll straighten out with proper blocking, surely. That tip, however? Not fixable without changing the purls to knits, at least for a few rows. Not by any method I could conceive as I lay not sleeping for a good 45 minutes after bedtime. Nope, not sleeping. Just thinking and scheming and plotting and, finally, cursing quite a bit, ’cause that graft was gonna have to come out. Frak it to Hades.
At work last night, I decided to try something different with the unfinished right mitt cap, to see how it would work before I resorted to tfarg-ing (that’s “graft” backward) the left cap. I shifted the stitches on the needle and laddered down 4 rows on the purls, switching them to knit stitches, to even out the top of the fabric. Then I flipped it inside out and poked the needle and yarn end down through the opening (between the live stitches) and grabbed a crochet hook. I used the hook to do a three-needle bindoff on the stitches, which took about 2 minutes and was easy-peasy.
Then I flipped the mitt cap right side out and checked to see how bad it looked. Here’s what I found:
By george, I think we've hit on something here!
Gaze upon the loveliness that is an inverted three-needle bindoff over all knit stitches! So pretty and regular and (dare I say it? I do!) easy. Even the tip, viewed straight on, looked just fine, probably because of the nature of this particular yarn. A smoother or finer yarn might not be as amenable to this particular application, but the Noro seems to like it just fine. (Whew!)
I spent a good 20 minutes or so picking out the graft from the left mitt cap, dropping the two purl stitches back 4 rows and making them knit stitches, then inverting and three-needle-binding off. Here’s the result:
Much better!
Again, please disregard the wonkiness at the bottom of the cap. Blocking and attaching it to the mitt itself should take care of that.
I don’t have time to stitch the caps to the mitts now, but I did pin them in place with a couple of stitch holders. Here’s a preview shot:
They're starting to look a lot like mittens!
I’ll tackle the attachment tonight on my break or in the morning after work.
Don’t ask about the thumbs. I haven’t figured that out yet. But I sure hope it turns out to be a lot less fussy than the caps were.
What are the odds?
Write, Knit, Read, Purrrrr 