In Wool We Trust

Last night I finished knitting the body of the Vaila Slipover. Here it is, in all of its sack-o-potatoes glory.

And this morning, while knitting with friends, I did a 3-needle bind-off across the shoulders. It’s a cool construction. After putting some of the stitches at the back of the neck on a holder, a mini-steek about 6 rows long is added across the gap. Then, during the 3-needle bind-off, the mini-steek is connected to the main v-neck steek. This would only work if you had the correct number of stitches across the shoulders, which I had, because I’d changed the number of decreases as mentioned in the last post. I wish I could say that I’d done the math to figure it out, but I didn’t. This pattern doesn’t give much in the way of stitch count checks, but at the one point the pattern told me how many stitches I should have, I was spot on. So I was right. Yay, me!

I agonized over whether to sew this steek to reinforce it. So, after reading a bit about this yarn and thinking about it, I took the plunge. I decided to just trust that this wool would be grabby enough to just hang on. The next part of the instructions read, with alarming simplicity and off-handedness, “Cut neck extra sts up the center.” So that’s what I did.

Behold, the power of 100% wool! No reinforcing. No crochet chain. No hand sewing. No machine sewing. Just the yarn wanting to stick to itself. Now, I haven’t gotten all fiddly with it yet, so it remains to be seen how well this all sticks together. I’m thinking of running the steamer over the cut edges and giving them a little zhuzh to encourage the fibers to interlock. But so far, with the minimal amount of handling I’ve done, all is well. After the steam treatment, I get to pick up the stitches around the neck edge. That’s when we’ll find out whether my faith was warranted.

And even though I’ve cut steeks before, you have no idea how much my hands were shaking during all that snipping.