"Fear is the Project Killer"

It seems I got my stitches in a bunch and it wasn't looking good for finding a fix.  I wanted to create a new hat for my newly-teenaged son -- something more in line of  his current fashion sense.  I went shopping in my yarn stash and found two hanks of Berroco's Inca Gold, a blend of merino wool and silk.  I picked up one of my new crochet hooks and set to work using half-double crochet stitches.

All was going well, very well indeed!  Then it came time to create the brim of the hat.  At first I thought, "wouldn't it be cool to knit it?"  To, you know, make my first official bi-stitchual project -- without the use of a crochet hook.  So I rummaged through my little knitting needle stash and found a pair of circulars I thought would do the job.  Unfortunately the cable proved it was too long and thus it became too big of a pain to deal with.  I ripped out all the knitted stitches I had made.

So I went to my next game plan ... use the Dyak Craft Interchangeable crochet hook and "knook" it. (Not familiar with the term "knook?" Look it up on my Types & Techniques page on my website)  That seemed to be working quite well.  It was working so well, so well indeed!, I decided to pop the DVD in of The Black Swan and continue on my merry little way with my stitching.

Unfortunately, in looking at my work this morning, I shouldn't have.  I found a few errors.  Normally, even with my limited knitting experience, I know how to fix the errors ...  first secure the stitches that are good, then pull out the bad column of stitches, and then rebuild them back up using a crochet hook.  No problem, right?

Wrong.  I decided I had to use the Twisted Knit Stitch.  That's right; I had to complicate things; lol.  I had to figure out how to retwist the column of stitches I had pulled out so that they would be uniform to the rest of the brim design.  Unfortunately I couldn't find any help sites on the Internet on how to do this, so I vented on Twitter a little:

I stewed a little.  I agreed with Chicken Little that the sky was falling.  I thought about giving up -- after all I could give it as a Christmas gift instead of a Birthday gift, thus buying me some time.  I might have cursed a bit too, although I won't admit to that. {{whistles innocently}}

And then it came to me:  pull out the column of stitches that include the error, insert hook into loop, give it a counter-clockwise twist before pulling up the next loop. Repeat until column has been rebuilt.

I gave it a try AND it WORKED!!  My fear of  having to kill the project turned to pure joy!

And the really cool part is, aside from figuring out how to fix an intentional twisted knit stitch -- my project is 100% made with crochet hooks.  Three to be exact.  A few more rows & this project will be done.  Whoot!