Eeek! Steeks!

So I'm in the grocery store, waiting at the checkout, looking at all the magazines. You know the ones I'm talking about, the Diabetic Cookbook one and the Get Organized one and the Archie and Jughead double digest one...and they're all about that size. Then my eyes land on the quintessential supermarket checkout magazine; The Complete Idiots Guide to Healthy Relationships.

...

Sure, why not.

Anyhoo, I wasn't entirely forthcoming about my WIP in my last post. I had plans. Big plans. Scary plans. Steeking plans!



Here's the steeking prep, a crochet edge on either side of the stitch you want to cut.

I'd be remiss if I didn't pause here and explain to my non-knitting readers, if you've hung in this long, that steeking is a process that instills great fear and confusion in knitters. The whole thing is counter intuitive. The whole point of knitting something properly, is so that it won't fall apart. For you see, steeking is where you knit something, a complete something no less, and then you cut it up. Be forewarned, the rest of this post is heavy on the geeky, knit-technical content, but feel free to stick around.



So I did the crochet thing, cuz that's what Eunny Jang told me to do (the steeking instructions were from a Eunny Jang pattern that I hope to knit in the future...hence trying out the steeking thing now, rather than on $50.00 worth of yarn that I really really care about) and then made my cut. And it wasn't all that bad. I was a little nervous, but as this is an experimental sweater anyway, I was willing to deal with the aftermath.

Which to be honest, was a bit of a mess. I'd neglected to factor in the floats from the colourwork just hanging around back there, on the wrong side of the sweater. I suppose if I were the kind of person who didn't dive into things headlong, without any regard for rules and the proper way of doing things, I might have consulted a reference (hello? Ravelry?) or two before, ya know, cutting through the floats. Or, I suppose I might have secured them with the crochet process as well. Nuh-uh. I just cut 'em. I had planned on picking up the stitches a few stitches over from where I had cut, so I figured they'd be pretty secure anyway. Which I did, and they were...sorta...but then they all kind of became loosey goosey and, well, parts of the colourwork, ie. the nice white patterns on the right side of the sweater looked like the dog's breakfast.

So anyway, yadda yadda yadda, I tacked down the facing from the steek on the inside of the sweater and picked up the stitches for the edging I wanted to do.



I cannot tell you how many times I have done this. I'd done the right side completely, knit, bound off, sewn down only to clue in that perhaps I had picked up a few too many stitches. Had to knit the left side in the correct number just to be sure.



Seeing as I wasn't going to be able to block out the obvious discrepancy, I had to rip it all out and do it again. Much better. I plan to sew in a zipper here, so please pray that there is one out there that is the correct size.

I'm also going to knit a collar and then block the snot out of it, as it's really rather bunchy. But a nice sturdy sweater. And Dorothy? It's supposed to be a size 2, but it looks bigger than that to me, so I dunno. Then again, I can't really reference kids clothes all that well.

So...that was my adventure in steeking. Steeking is, to my understanding, only supposed to be done with 100% wool, and I know that this Shetland Chunky that I knit the sweater out of is most definitely a wool/acrylic blend, which may account for some of the sts coming loose. But anyway, glad to have finally tried it. The funniest thing is, when I picked up this wool at the thrift store, I sort of saw something just like this being knit out of it. It wasn't a clear idea, but I thought it would make more of a jacket than a sweater. Kinda neat.

Until later...