Hey everyone. I hope you all had a good and productive week. I missed my flight out of Israel and ended up stranded here for a few extra days. I hoped to work on my vest on the 14 hour flight home and then do some photos after I got home on Friday, then have a nice post with finished photos.
Unfortunately because I missed my flight I wasn’t able to do all my homework and I’ll be flying all of Saturday. So I had to skip straight to the button band to make sure I had something to post this week. I will post finished photos of the garment after I sew on the buttons and finish blocking the piece…. hopefully by Wednesday.
So this week we will discuss how to remove your provisional cast on. In week two I linked to a great video that shows you how to remove this cast on, but just in case you were curious to see a step by step process I have created one for you.
 
 
First you want to take out the original knot you made with the working yarn and the waste yarn. Then to be safe just take a needle a few sizes smaller than your working needle and thread this needle through your live stitches with waste yarn still in the work. Then remove the waste yarn- your work should look like the second picture above. Remember the nature of the cast on we used for this pattern twists the orientation of every other stitch. You can see this a little better in the picture above and to the right.
 
 
There are two ways to correct the orientation of the twisted stitches. This is the first way. You can start by transferring the stitches by just slipping them. If you do this make sure to stay on the same needle size as you picked up the live stitches with, if you change to a larger needle this could stretch your stitches. When it comes to the twisted stitch (as shown in the first and last pictures above) you will slip the stitch from your left hand needle to your right hand needle purl wise and through the back loop. The stitches that aren’t twisted (as shown in the second picture above) just slip them off purl wise as usual. After you have transferred all the stitches then you are ready to start your button band.
 
 
The second way to tackle the twisted stitches is to just simply work into them. Remember that if you are going to actually work into the stitch that you have to change your needle size to the appropriate needle size in the pattern. You can work off the smaller needle size onto the larger needle size, you don’t have to transfer the stitches. The way you would approach this is the same way you would approach the stitch transfer. The first stitch (since it’s the right side row) you will knit into the back loop of the stitch, then yf, sl p.wise (as usual)… and so on.
Remember that when you bind off your work you should go up 2-3 needle sizes so that your stitches don’t pull tight and pucker. Next time I will post some photos of the finished piece with buttons and all.  Please let me know if you have any questions- you can post them here, Ravelry or Facebook or email them to me@graceakhrem.com.
 
 
