Faery Ring Fiasco!

First, the promised apple blossoms!

I had a rough weekend. Well, OK, the weather was positively stunning, and once I got off work Saturday afternoon there were some very good parts but then I had a serious knitting setback.

I have been knitting away for the past month or two on two sweaters that I hoped to have ready to show in my Peace Weavers booth at the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival. I am quite confident that Kim will be completed in time.

My Faery Ring, however, is going in the wrong direction!


Here is what the back looked like on Saturday afternoon. I decided that I should add shoulder shaping and I sent the designer a message on ravelry about it on Friday. On Saturday I charted out the short rows and then went to check ravelry for a reply. I had no messages, so I had a look at the other six Faery Rings in progress, and on laureole's project notes I found a note that she discovered that there were 6 cables missing from the pattern for the back. She wrote the designer on March 26th, who confirmed the error.

What?!? I looked at the pattern photograph and then the pattern page listing the sequence of charts. Damn! (OK, that's not what I really said, but you get the idea.) There should have been 3 more cables on either side of the cable section of the back - less seed stitch, more cables. It looks much better with those extra cables.

And don't I wish I had known about this on March 26th?

Wait a minute - Why didn't I know about it on March 26th?
Why didn't the designer contact each of the ravelers knitting this project?
Why didn't she post a correction on the pattern page?
Why didn't she identify this free pattern from the beginning as
Has Not Been Test Knitted, Knitter Beware!

More bad words.
I sent a message to the designer, in which I tried to be polite but pissed.
I complained to my husband.
I complained to the Fiber Traditions list.
I felt a little better. I considered my options and the likely results.

1) Do nothing = be dissatisfied.
2) Frog the entire body to the beginning of the body cables = hang myself out of frustration, using the resulting yarn mess.
3) Frog just the back to the armhole decreases & then unravel the 16 stitches that should have been cabled = possible eventual satisfaction.

I slept on it and Sunday morning came up with:
4) Unravel the 16 stitches and re-knit them as cables = slow but steady redemption.

So that's what I did. Behold, a damn lot of frogging:


It's an ugly sight, I know. Shocking, really.

The next thing was to pick up the 16 stitches with a spare needle


And then I began working each row.



The trick is to work across the row with as normal tension as you can manage, given that you're knitting with a closed loop of yarn. And then, transfer each stitch from the left to the right needle, pulling firmly to equalize the tension across the row. I had more slack on the left side of the correction at first, but I worked at closing that gap and it got better.


Here is about half of one side done - this took two hours.

But here you can see what's left to do on this side. And then there is the other side, so the whole repair will take about 8 hours.

Damn.


On the bright side,more inventory has been arriving for MS&W. I got the Faroe Island wool in and it smells so sheepy! Primitive and beautiful. I'm trying to decide what kind of sample to knit. There are 3 weights of yarn in singles, 2 ply and 3 ply,

and there are 5 natural sheep colors.

I have two books of Faroe knitting -

a book of traditional shawls


and a book of colorwork patterns. And as I dig through my library I'm finding bits of information about Faroe knitting in other books.

But I don't really have time to play with this now. I will see what I have left after Maryland and plan some projects, like knitted felted slippers, a lace shawl and maybe a sweater.

Tomorrow - the puppets!