Something Really Scary

Happy Easter to everybody!!!

If there's one thing a knitter fears it's putting a scissor to your knitting. It's just not done. It's evil. It's really, really scary.

Now, the More Stripes Vest was asking me to do just that *shiver*
The idea is to keep the continuity of the stripes at the left and right hand side of the neck opening. As the stripes are coming naturally from the yarn and they have really long and fairly random repeats, there's no way to keep the symmetry if you knit the left and the right side separately. So, what you do is to knit the neck opening in one go and then *gasp* cut down the middle of the knitted piece in the end. This, by the way, is called steeking.

Before you cut, you sew two lines on either side of the intended cut with a sewing machine. To illustrate this I drew white lines (for the sewing lines) and one red line (where the cut is being made)
Some people recommend a strong drink before cutting, but I managed without.

(just after the first couple of snips - hmm, could be the picture is a bit out of focus because I'm still shaking so much ;))
Right now the front - with open neck hole is blocking, and then I'm ready to sew everything
together.



I'm also presenting to you the block number 18:
and block number 19 for my Aran Afghan