The Knitting Fiend

I’m probably crazy because I’d just decided to wing the construction of the saddle shoulder / sleeve connection. With my typical over confidence, I knit two 10 stitch wide strips to make shoulder saddle. I left the edge stitches on strings, then I picked up stitches and knit the front and back. The initial plan was to pick up saddle stitches, then pick up the rest of the stitches from the armhole and knit down.

Naturally, I decided not to do that. I realized that working all these cable crosses holding a whole blasted sweater in my lap would be a pain. So, I just cast on and knit the sleeve down to the cuffs then bound off.

Today, the moment of truth arrived.

I know I can graft most of the sleeve to the sleeve edge, but would I be able to graft the sleeve to the saddle? I laid the shoulder next to the top edge of the sleeve, and mulled it over.

Then, I pulled the yarn out of the 10 shoulder saddle stitches. I decided at that moment the grafted seam would look better if I unraveled the last row of stitches. This scared me a bit. What would happen to the stitches on the edge of the body? But, I decided, “What the heck? I can fix anything that goes wrong with the tapestry needle.”

I ran a DPN through the second to the last row, and began to unravel (see image to the left).

Then . . .

I laid the shoulder saddle directly below the sleeve, and lined up the 4 stitch wide cables. Since I needed to graft both knit and purl stitches, I squinted awhile trying to figure out how to graft.

I finally decided to start in the center of the cable. I slid the half the stitches on a second DPN; see below left. Then, I cut a strand of yarn, threaded a tapestry needle and started to graft from left to right, leaving a long tail at the left edge. When I’d finished grafting the right side, I threaded the tail and grafted in the other direction.

Look at the image below right. Seems fine, doesn’t it? In knitting, overconfidence seems to be its own reward!

Now, I will admit, I found this tricky enough to be unable to take decent pictures of the actual grafting process. Mostly, I just grafted the knit stitches like knit stitches (which I show here; then, I thought backwards and grafted the purls like purls.

Believe it or not, I didn’t remove the waste yarn from before grafting the sleeve stitches. I snipped it used the tip of my tapestry needle to pulled it out after I grafted each stitch.

Strangely, enough, I found leaving the waste yarn in place made grafting seem sort of like drawing on tracing paper; I could “see” where the grafted stitches were supposed to go, and just “traced” over the shape of the waste yarn stitches! I know that description probably doesn’t really help anyone understand “how” to do this, but I’ll try to get a better picture showing how to graft this when I do the other shoulder.

And… of course.. I’d advise you practice this on a swatch first. You might not want to live quite as dangerously as I do. Still, as you can see, this worked great!

Now, I need to sew the rest of the seam, but grafting the saddle bit was the part that made me nervous.