I promised a status report on my tam and here it is: nearly 2 inches tall.  Yep, that’s it.

But it has been an interesting 2 inches.  Nice slippery yarn on double-pointed needles.  The Channel Island cast-on was an adventure – a crazy thumb-waggling dance that left my hands shakey as jelly!  Anyhow, once I had cast on and got my ribbing established, things went quietly for a while.  And then I started the little cable pattern and that went smoothly  too – for a while.  Until I realized that I had screwed up the pattern — having purled stitches that should have been knit.  Four rows back.  Nuts!  (Double-darn-snarkin’ Nuts!).  I was in a moving vehicle at the time, so decided I would put it aside and stew over it. 

I stewed and bubbled and burbled over my options:

1)      Just let it be – after all, it was a subtle pattern in a variegated yarn – but it looked like a gobbedy-gook of knits and purls, not like any sort of pattern at all, subtle or otherwise.

2)      Rip it back.  Yeah, rip back 4 rows of slippery yarn (184 stitches per row) and hope I get it all back onto the dpns without something catastrophic happening (and, no, I had not put in a lifeline – sigh)

3)      Variation of “2” – pull out one needle at a time an rip back.  Less loose stitches to deal with at once (kind of brilliant, really – I was sort of proud of that one). But still risky.  And, blast it all, I would still have to re-knit the rows I had pulled back.  And even tho I am a firm believer in tinking or ripping back to fix mistakes, it really gets my goat to lose a lot of rows!

4)      Work across the next row, dropping down to turn the purls into knits.  It would take some time – and would be a bit tricksy with those tiny stitches in slippery yarn – but I would avoid pulling the needles out and then having to get them back in again.  And I would not lose those 4 rows!

So, that evening, I sat down with my “Darth Mal” crochet hook (it has a hook at each end, one a size smaller than the other) and started in. 

The process was thus: knit 4 sts, *drop the next st  4 rows catching up the tiny purl and changing it to a knit, crochet up the 4 rows, slip the st onto the left needle and knit it onto the right needle* then do the bit btwn the *s 3 more times and begin again with the knit 4. For 184 stitches. 

I got better at it as I went along, swinging away with the “Darth Mal” – since dropping sts worked better with the smaller hook and crocheting up worked better with the larger one since it did not split the yarn as easily (oh, there was still some yarn splitting – as well as a few harrowing moments when the tiny purl seemed to melt away before my eyes…).    

Each 8-stitch section (4 rapid knits and then 4 columns of sts that are dropped, corrected, and re-worked – 16 re-done sts in each section) was a little triumph.  It took me over an hour to get half-way round (an intense hour) and I called it a night at that point.  I took it up again the next day and finished, without incident, about an hour later.  It was kind of fun, in a sort of fussy, surgical way.  More fun than rescuing a slew of loose slippery sts.  More fun than re-knitting 4 rows.   Not so much fun that I would want to do it again.  But I am glad I fixed it – it looks smooth and pretty.  And I have this perky little “hey, I did it!” feeling.