Would you have risked it?
This could so easily have been a tale of woe… Perhaps don’t read on if you are of a nervous disposition when it comes to knitting projects and reckless behaviour.
At the first in person yarn show that I attended, post-pandemic, I fell in love with some beautiful Wool Kitchen hand-dyed yarn. It’s a blue-faced Leicester DK yarn with a zip dyed pattern. I have spent months gazing at this beautiful yarn in my stash, and day dreaming about what it was to become.
Finally, last autumn, the perfect pattern presented itself – the Wearing Jumper (Ravelry link) from Donna Smith’s Langsoond collection.
I eagerly wound the yarn and cast on. Sleeves first, then the body.
I spent a couple of months knitting on this delightful bottom-up raglan sweater. It has a clever neck construction which creates a really wearable high-necked sweater. Perfect in all the cold weather we have been having of late.
As I knitted, there were some niggling doubts. Quiet voices in my head. I was getting the correct gauge for the pattern, but I wasn’t loving the fabric. It was a bit too loose and stretchy.
Why do I ignore those voices? My brain almost always warns me when something isn’t quite right with a project, but I have a horrible tendency to just ignore myself and plough on.
Once the knitting was complete, I soaked the sweater and laid it out to dry. I was so pleased to have finished a garment for myself. The first one in a long time! However the fabric was floppy, and as I feared, didn’t look too great as the gauge wasn’t particularly well-suited to this yarn. A large swatch could have told me this at the start of the project. Ahem…
Once it was dry I tried it on, and realised I was very unlikely to wear it in its current state. It was stretchy and floppy and felt saggy and baggy. Not what you generally want from a garment! As far as I could see, I had three options:
Gift the garment to someone else.
Frog it*, and reknit at a tighter gauge and perhaps in a bigger size.
Throw it in the tumble drier to see whether I could felt it just enough to tighten everything up.
I ruled out option 1 as it wasn’t going to look great on someone else either! I am way too lazy to choose option 2. I know that lots of people do frog entire sweaters, but I just couldn’t face it. So I took a huge risk and threw the slightly damp sweater into my tumble drier.
I tumbled it for half an hour on a medium heat, and thought about how I would feel if it came out like cardboard. I calculated that it was around 50 hours worth of work, not to mention the cost of the yarn! I generally like to think of myself as quite a cautious person, but this was throwing up a very impulsive side to my nature.
And breathe.
I am delighted to say that my gamble paid off!
The fabric tightened up. The holey-ness was gone! And all of a sudden I had a Wearing Jumper – something that would actually get worn.
So what did I learn?
Knit a good-sized swatch Jen. Good grief!
Listen to the quiet voices in your head while you work on a project.
And if the worst comes to the worst, sometimes a gamble can pay off.
I am definitely not advocating that anyone recklessly throws 50 hours worth of knitting into the tumble drier on the off-chance. But my question to you is this…
Would you have risked it?
Just to clarify: There was no inherent problem with either the yarn or the pattern. It was simply that I hadn’t checked that the yarn made a suitable fabric when knitted at the pattern gauge. I got lucky because the pattern was written with plenty of positive ease, so my ever-so-slightly felted jumper still fits really well.
*Frogging is the action of ripping out your knitting. It is named this way as “rip-it” is the noise a frog makes.