Sunday, September 23, 2012

If I Knew Then What I Know Now...

Wow. This is both the best and worst thing about the internet.

Back around the dawn of time - well, October 2005, I was knitting the Rogue hoodie, and I blogged about grafting the hood.

It was my ninth post on this blog. 9th!

Rogue is an amazing pattern, a fabulous cabled hoodie with cables that flow into the hood. The hood has to be seamed at the top, and the designer recommended grafting it, although if memory serves the three-needle BO was also suggested as an option.

Not to be one to resist a challenge, I forged ahead with the grafting. It wasn't easy, working across the cables. After all, cables are ribs, and therefore there are combinations of knits and purls.

The standard instructions for grafting that are offered are for stockinette stitch fabrics, and it doesn't look right if you blithely follow them across reverse stockinette stitch (or indeed garter stitch) - and it looks even wonkier if you try to make it work across a ribbed fabric that changes between knits and purls on a single row. I spent a fair bit of time figuring out how to do it for the ribbing. It worked, I was happy with it, and I blogged about how to do it.

I received a very nice email last week from designer and teacher Joan Schrouder. She informed me that my blog post was being discussed on Ravelry, and she very politely and very gently took exception to it.

The bit that's wrong is that I made a couple of sweeping statements about how to graft in reverse stocking stitch and garter stitch. And I was wrong.

Not totally wrong, but wrong enough. What I offered did indeed work for Rogue, but was not the global solution I thought it was.

I wrote the post in 2005 and hadn't read it since. My knowledge and experience have grown significantly since then, and I now understand better the technique of grafting and all the possible situations and required variations.

Once the embarrassment wore off, I was thrilled that Joan took the time to get in touch, and I thanked her profusely. And I promised her I would update the post - which I will.

So yes, the best thing about the internet is that it's forever; everything is preserved so that it can always be found. This is also the worst thing about the internet: that my naivete is still there to be found.

I'm just glad I was informed, so I can fix it.

Ever growing, ever learning...

1 comment:

Cindy/KS said...

On the 1 hand, you could change what you wrote then. But at the time you wrote it, it was what you knew. So to change it now, to me, is to change history. So what I would suggest doing myself is to edit in a link to it & do a totally new post that tells how you now know to do it. But that is just me!

And I love the hoodie!