Parisian Beanie Beret

I actually finished the beret over a week ago but just haven’t gotten around to blogging about it. So here it is…

I’m really quite pleased with it and was certainly glad that I went back and redid the bit I got wrong.

It was nice to do something a little challenging. Once I got into the rhythm of it, it was fairly straight forward, but I haven’t done much knitting by reading a chart before, which this pattern is, so that was good practice.

It was a bit tricky to understand the row after the ribbing. You have to add in stitches at various places and at first I didn’t understand how it was meant to go. My problem was that when I increase, I usually knit into the front and back of a stitch. But in this case I needed to Make 1 stitch (M1) rather than work into the front and back. My ever-faithful The Knitter’s Bible book actually says that M1 is often used when increasing stitches after a rib, and this is exactly what was called for. A friend on Ravelry who has already made one of these, also confirmed my thoughts on how to do this row.

The other tricky bit was working out how to do the stitches which had to cross-right and cross-left. Basically a cable with just one stitch. The pattern had some diagrams on how to do this but the pictures themselves weren’t exactly clear. The written instructions for cross-left were ok – slip 2 sts knitwise, slip them back in reverse order, then purl one, knit one as usual. However the cross-right instructions didn’t make sense to me. I did start to use a cable needle to do the cross stitches, but the stitches kept sliding off my cable needle and it takes longer to do it like that. In the end I did the cross-right by carefully taking the two stitches off the needle and without dropping them, put them back on the left needle in the other way around. It was by far the quickest way to do it and the stitches are large enough not to drop and lose them.

Didn’t understand how I was meant to finish it off either, once I had drawn the thread through the remaining stitches at the centre of the beret… so I just wove the end in as normal.

Pattern available from Stitch Diva

Busted beret

I’ve got wrong with the beret pattern repeats.  Just in one section, but way, way down and it’s affected the whole of the section.  I can’t just drop the incorrect stitches and pick up again because it’s so far down and the cable crossover is too complicated for my brain to work out how to pick up again.

So I’m in a dilemma…

Should I just carry on and ignore it?  It probably wouldn’t notice to the casual observer, but I’ll know it’s there, and I’m not entirely sure whether when I come to the shaping that it will look ok or become more obvious.

Or should I frog it back?  Too many rows to undo it all – it would take AGES.  So I’d have to try and insert the needle through the stitches just below the point where I went wrong.  But I’m not convinced I’ll get it correct – the crossovers will confuse me I’m sure.

So shall I just start again?  hmm… I don’t know…