Fair Isle problem

How-to Questions
1

I’ve just learned to do Fair Isle knitting and am working on a cotton sweater of my own design.

I’m using a variegated yarn for the ribbing at top and bottom and also as a border between panels (wide stripe with background of one color and foreground of another color).

I now know that the Fair Isle technique produces a fabric with less stretch and that large blocks done with a single thread are stretchier.

But I didn’t realize it when I made a rather wide border of reverse stockinette in the variegated yarn. The Fair Isle portion above and below it is nice and flat. But the single-thread reverse stockinette makes a bulge instead of lying flat. It’s in the worst possible place, right above the waist. And I didn’t realize the problem until I’d got way past that.

There is NO WAY I’m going to rip out everything from the neck down to correct this, but correct it I must.

Here are some things I’ve considered:

  • Embroider something in duplicate stitch onto the reverse stockinette
  • Use some sort of smocking technique to gather up the looseness
  • Put in a lifeline at the top and bottom of this area, cut out most of the area between the lifelines and unravel the rest, then make a better border and graft the two sections together with Kitchener stitch. The sweater is long enough to allow this.

Ideas?

2

I am SO not a sewer, so I like the idea of the lifelines and taking it out. :thinking:

You’re more ambitions than I am in this, and I admire your willingness to fix rather than reknit. I think I would have torn down to the bottom of the band of rev st st, just because reknitting is easier for me. I’d love to see it when you’re done!

3

I’d have ripped it back if I’d realized there was a problem. By the time I did realize it, I had a good two weeks’ worth of hard knitting time in.

I don’t know if it’s feasible to remove a section of knitting from the middle, if you can stick in a couple of lifelines and treat the top one like a provisional cast-on and get live stitches to do a Kitchener graft on.

Has anyone ever tried something like this?

Alternatively, the only problem is that this section is just stretchier than the Fair Isle part. So if I can find some way to make it less stretchy so it will have the same stretchiness as the rest of it, the problem will be solved.

There’s got to be a way. Help! Help!