Scissors and West Desert Hood

The West Desert Hood went with me to Port Orchard, it is what I knit on for two hours at the port.

When the knitting of this cowl began it was clear the amount of dark gray yarn on hand would be cutting it very close to the amount needed.  Little did I know then I'd be cutting to under 17 inches or 43 cm close.  Don't get me wrong, I don't enjoy creating  waste yarn, by this is cutting it far too close for comfort.

The entirety of leftover yarn there on the counter

To get to this point of only a small amount of extra yarn, there was a need to manipulate the work.  The cowl begins with a 5 row border of ribbing or in my case 5 rows of the seed/moss stitch.  As the end of my yarn supply neared there were only 2 rows of the border completed leaving choices to be made:

1. Leave it with 5 rows at the cast on and only 1 row at the cast off (there needed to be enough yarn to cast off).
2. Take the entire project apart and start over again making adjustments from the start.
3. Find another gray colour that would work to finish the remaining 3 rows and then cast off.  This search for a suitable match has been done before with great failure and much time wasted.  
4. Find a way to shorten the number of rows at the start (cast-on) and use the extra yarn to match the number of rows at the end of the project at the cast-off.

I decided to pursue the final solution, but it meant locating something that could help me figure out how to do it.

Before I get into what I did there's something that should be said here about the cast-on row.  It is difficult to deconstruct a knitted item from the cast on (beginning) of the work. When one is frogging (taking apart) the stitches beyond the cast-on they pull away from the work automatically.  The cast-on row doesn't operate this way at all. The yarn is linked together in a particular way that means each leg of the stitch needs to be removed individually thus doubling the times the extra yarn needs to be pulled through the work.  It can be done but is very time consuming and rather boring.

So I searched on the internet using these words - How to shorten at the cast on.  Amazingly there were a few sites that offered not only directions but instructive pictures or drawings on how to do this.  These sites can be found here and here and they both come highly recommended.

To begin the process you need to know how much yarn to take off.  In the case of something already knit too long it is just a matter of measuring precisely where you want to have the garment end.  If the garment is too short you pick a few rows from the start, remove and then add knitting as necessary to make the garment long enough.  In my case, I'm mining extra yarn so I guessed.  Yup, I just took a leap of faith at what was needed and then cut a singular stitch, started removing stitches and picking up the live stitches on an empty needle. (I don't mean to brag, but that guess was good considering how low the tolerance level was.  The knitting gods were with me on this one.)

Once the appropriate amount of yarn is removed one goes back casting off and then taking the mined yarn to finish the other end.  (Confusing I know, check out the photos or diagrams in the links if you need a visual.)

Last night I described this process to Tena at knit night.  Her first comment to me was how very brave it was of me to take a scissors to cut a nearly completed cowl.  It deserves repeating, she is a very kind person.  It was not brave to do this, perhaps desperate, naive, crazy, but certainly not brave.  My point of view was something like this:  Hey, it says here on the internet this sort of cutting, removing, and restoring works, so if I just follow the directions (mostly as they are written) things should be fine.  And sure enough it did work out.  See for yourself, the finished project still needs all the ends woven in and a good blocking, but the borders match like they should.

The top border and bottom are both three rows 

Sometimes sheer dumb-luck works.  And the way I looked at it if this didn't work I still had #2 of my options above to fall back on.  Only this time no fall-back position was necessary.

Today's bonus:

That's an angora rabbit under all that fluff.  Or is it a cloud with a pink nose?  Either way it's an unusual photo.