Scary Halloween Story! - The Knit Picks Staff Knitting Blog

by Alison on May 26, 2010

I’ve been saving up this one until it was seasonally appropriate!

When the Spring 08 issue of Knitty came out, I got all excited about the Tempest sweater. I picked out my colors, swatched, blogged, and knit myself into a frenzy. I should have carried the colors up between stripes, a lesson I learned the hard way as I wove in about 3,000 yarn ends.

I have a bad habit of finishing sweaters to the 99% point and then leaving them to languish without buttons for ages. Even though I knit it up pretty quickly, this sweater fell to the same fate and I stuffed it in a corner of my craft room for about a month before finally picking up some appropriately-sized wooden buttons.

Here’s the part of my story that’ll make a knitter’s blood run cold:

Let’s just say that I have a dear, plump little cat in my house that likes to nibble on fancy fibers. Her name is Annie, we call her Kittenboo, and she is a holy terror when it comes to chomping big ol’ holes in my finished garments.

Time for some knitting triage! First, I grabbed an antique can of Pattern-Sta, wetting my fingers with a little of the stuff and applying along the edge of the kitty chomp. Tempest calls for fingering-weight yarn knit at 5 stitches to the inch, which is pretty loose, and I was worried about everything coming undone.

Next, I picked up and knitted new foundation stitches along the edge of the chomp, trying to even out the edge of the fabric.

I knitted a tiny strip of fabric in the color of the button band, adding a little extra length so I could turn it up like the rest of the sewn hem.

I grafted the little strip into place, then sewed my edges down into place and turned up the bit at the bottom to mimic the hem on the opposite side.

Once everything was in place, I added a strip of grosgrain ribbon at the bottom of each inside front edge. I thought about running it up the full length of the front, but I was concerned that the ribbon would make the edge too inflexible and that it would interfere with the natural stretchiness of the loosely-knit fabric.