Friday, March 1, 2013

Broken Arrow

Last night, I had a broken arrow...errm...needle incident that nearly resulted in lost stitches. I was trying to finish up one last round before I had to run out the door.

And, wouldn't you know it? I had a catastrophic failure on my Knit Picks interchangeable needles. Essentially, the cable came out of the actual connector attached to my interchangeable circular needles, and it dropped 1/3 of the stitches (out of 500+) when the cable pulled back!!!



I had to do some really quick patch-up of the problem, by grabbing another circular needle and picking up what had dropped. Luckily, this was wool & mohair so the stitches stayed put rather well, all things considering. But it was a RIGHT PAIN IN THE ARSE! (And made me run late, because I couldn't just leave the stitches hanging!)

After stabilizing the patient...er...my knitting...to the point where I was reasonably satisfied that I no longer had a broken arrow situation, I set it aside carefully so I could fix it when I got home. (There was also some dire warnings to DH to not touch it or let anyone --- cough the cats cough get near it.)

When I finally got home, it was surgery time, and I carefully moved all of the stitches onto a new cable, and all was right and happy again. (And yes, I haven't gotten very far. I'm only on Welt 4.)



Then took the broken cable needle, connector, and some superglue to see if I could repair the damage. I'm not sure WHY it broke like that, but it's been a fair number of years since I bought the set and these cables have seen a fair amount of use. Plus, I know there must have been a heavy strain on these particular ones as it's holding a fair number of stitches and I've been constantly re-arranging the distribution of fabric as I knit. So, I'm going to put this down to just general "wear-and-tear" versus any manufacturer error.

2 comments:

  1. very resourceful. would you allow me to use this in my series of blogs on knitting I will give page refs for you. If not I understand. Thanks for posting this.

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