This afternoon, I had to do something that probably every knitter winds up doing sooner or later.

I ripped back a sweater in preparation to start over.

I had been knitting along on the Cobblestone pullover a couple days ago, and I realized something was wrong:



Ruh-roh. (I don't know if you can see it well in the photo but there is a very obvious - even more so under fluorescent light - demarcation between where I ended the first ball and then started alternating the next two).

You know how those nice kettle-dyed yarns tell you on the label to "alternate skeins every 2 to 4 rows" because there are no dye lots?

Believe it. (or, as one of my colleagues threatens to write on student papers about proper citation: "Learn it, use it, love it.")

So I thought about it for a bit. And I decided it had to go. It wasn't a "wouldn't be seen from a trotting horse" situation. It was a situation where I'd think of it every time I looked at the sweater, feel unhappy about it, and probably wear the sweater less as a result.

I sat down and ripped it back this afternoon.



Going, going, gone...

I won't give you any of the melodramatic folderol some knitters would use - I did not have to lie down in a dark room afterwards. Nor did I need a stiff drink or even a strong hot cup of tea (the feminine restorative of choice in Golden Era British mysteries).

No, although I'm sad to lose all that work, I'm actually glad I did it. The resulting sweater will be nicer. It will look more even. I won't always wonder while I'm wearing it, "Is the light in this room making The Color Change look obvious?"

And the other thing - I don't often get a chance in my life to literally rip out mistakes I make - to go back, start all over, and have no one (except, well, the people I TELL) be the wiser that it went wrong in the beginning.

So the sweater is now in Sweater Purgatory (where basically good sweaters gone wrong go) and it will be re-knit (to mix religious metaphors, it gets a chance at reincarnation - but it doesn't have to come back as a cockroach or something unpleasant). In fact, I think I might cast back on for it tonight and get going again. I actually feel kind of energized about this; ever since I spotted that little warning on the ball band (after I was more than halfway through the first skein), I kind of felt wrong about the sweater.

So: Cobblestone Pullover is dead; long live Cobblestone Pullover...