Aah, the return of real knitting content! I started the Bleeding Hearts Stole over a year ago, and just finally managed to finish the knitting yesterday. This evening, I grafted the two parts together. Here’s the “before” picture.
I am a real novice at Kitchener stitch, since I have only done it for a couple of socks, and I prefer to do toe-up socks in order to avoid it.. Because I was not confident in my grafting skills, especially in lace, I moved the graft off-center so it wouldn’t be featured so prominently on my back – I did 14 repeats for one half, and 6 repeats for the other, instead of 10 and 10. For guidance on Kitchener stitch, I used this Knitty.com article, which has excellent step-by-step photos. The grafting itself went rather easily, but the hard part was evening up the tension so it would look nice. What made it harder was that in this lace pattern, the graft line is zig-zagged! Here is part of my graft, done losely at first:
With much effort and strain on the eyes, I managed to get it looking somewhat even.
Below is the “after” picture. The grafting turned out better than I thought it would, but it’s still obvious, so I’m happy with my decision to move it to the side, where hopefully my arm will be covering it somewhat.
Tomorrow, blocking!
April 5, 2009 at 8:07 am
That’s gorgeous. Congratulations for finishing…..
April 5, 2009 at 10:54 am
Looks good! Congratulations on finishing it. Mine is sleeping in a knitting bag somewhere, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to it.
April 6, 2009 at 7:28 pm
You did it! It is beautiful–I can’t wait to see it! Good job!
April 7, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Beautiful. I feel like I’ve watched it being born!. Good job grafting. I wish I could do it that well.
Karen
April 11, 2009 at 5:28 pm
[...] Mods: I did not switch to a larger needle size for the bleeding hearts portion of the stole. Partly, I was too lazy, and partly, because I thought that flared ends might look nice. And I did not knit two equal halves, as detailed in my previous post. [...]