G. Knerd

Remember how excited I was when I got to the first blue stitches?  Like, perhaps unreasonably excited?

Yeah, that’s got nothing on what’s going on now.  I got to the red stitches.  Red, dudes.

I started getting excited as I started nearing the point where there was only one black stitch in the triangles between the blues:

I took the opportunity of having only 7 strands of yarn instead of 9 to untangle the mess attached to the back of the fabric.  It was getting, er…a little scary:

I straightened everything out and finally started to really, really fun part.  I knit the black stitches on the edge, the blue stitches in the first diamond, the first red stitch, the blue stitches in the second diamond, and started across the black stitches in the back of the cARGHdigan.

I was about halfway through the back when something seemed a little, um, wrong.

Can you see it in this picture?

How about in this picture?

What if I bring them both together?  And, er, add some helpful directions?

Yep, the red yarn escaped from its one stitch while I wasn’t paying attention.  I’ve been using this method where I don’t tie down the yarn ends until the end, which lets me have more control over how the knots affect the fabric and how the ends get woven in.  The downside to this method, though, is that when you’re only using the yarn with one stitch, you have to be really careful for the first row.

By the time I figured all of this out, I was already more than a hundred stitches past that point, and I really didn’t want to tink all those stitches so I could fix it.  Which lead to what I think of as the “duct tape fix” of knitting:

That’s right, I just slipped the red yarn through the loose stitch, tied a loose knot, and kept knitting.  When I got to it on the next row, I slipped the red yarn under the blue yarn (like it was supposed to be before it unraveled), put it back through the original black stitch, slipped that loop onto the needle, and knit it like I normally would.

Red diamonds, here we go!