Ghetto Seaming

As you may recall, I decided to kitchener the shoulders of my sweater closed but ran into a slight problem with undoing my cast-off. Well you will be pleased to know (or maybe you won't, but I am sure you are too kind to tell me otherwise) that I solved this little problem and now have both shoulders seamed. And neatly seamed at that. Huzzah!

And now, a photo essay on my journey into 'making it work' kitchener style. All photos can be clicked on to make bigger, not that it helps, but there ya go. In order to fudge the kitchener, I first had to pick up my stitches on the row underneath my undoable cast-off row so that I had live stitches. I got out my size zero needles and picked away.



This actually took some thought. I had to make sure I was picking up the same side of the stitch all the way across. I decided to pick up the front bit of the stitch and said to myself, "on front, skip back," as I made my way across. I also had to count, recount, and then recount again, to ensure that I had picked up the right number of stitches. Counting is hard. I no good at counting.

Once I had the stitches on the needle, I had to figure out how to orient everything so that my kitchener would work. This also took some thought.



Once I thought I had it right, I started kitchenering away. "Knit off, purl on, purl off, knit on."



I did a few and then checked to see if it looked right.



It looked right so I kept on going. And going. And then, voila! I was at the end.



For the most part this was a huge success. The cast off row gives the seam some heft, but not too much. My only issue is that I seemed to have aligned my stitches slightly differently on the second shoulder so that it aligns half a stitch off. On some other project, this would drive me nuts. On this one, I just don't care.