Any major knitterly repairs had to wait until tonight, since we had a birthday party this afternoon. One of my best friends’ son turns 2 this week, and our little family was invited to his party. I’m not going to post photos of them since I forgot to ask permission, but I am going to post a different photo (hi Debbie!) to my friend Debbie who is one of the very few non-knitters who reads my blog.

Jakob’s friend Taylor was at the party too, since we’ve known her father since high school, and her mom for the last few years. Taylor is exactly one day older than Jakob.
Hey baby…come here often?

Next, I grabbed a dpn and “picked up” stitches 2 rows below the one on the needles. I only picked up 6 sts at a time so the fabric wouldn’t pull too tightly. Once I had the first 6 sts on the needle, I CUT one stitch on the middle row…the one in between the two rows on needles. I used a spare needle to unpick the yarn from those 6 sts, then took another needle and picked up the next 6 sts, unpicked the middle row, etc… (Yes, I left the scissors in the photo on purpose. Looks ominous, huh? LOL).

Once I’d done that all the way around the row I had the two parts of the leg separate. I was then able to add another 12 rows (1.5″) in length to the foot part of the leg.
With the knitting done, I “tidied” up the two parts by arranging them on 2 dpns each, making sure that I had the front and back aligned properly (wouldn’t want to sew the foot on crooked!). I left a really long tail for grafting, then cut the yarn.
Finally, I Kitchenered (grafted) the foot part to the leg. You can kinda see here how much length was added. I’m breastfeeding (and don’t drink anyways) so I had a cup of Earl Gray as my fortification instead of the typical glass of wine. 😉 I was about to do the second leg when Yannick suggested that I wait until after Jakob wakes up tomorrow so that I can try it on him first and be sure that I didn’t add too much…or need to add more.
So there you have it. One leg lengthened by an inch and a half, with my first not-too-sucky graft. One more leg to go.

You can use this type of repair for any knitting that’s too short and you want to add length, OR you can use it for knitting that is too long.  Follow the same steps to separate the work into two pieces and then unravel the side that goes in the opposite direction of your knitting for the required length, plus one row.  If using my costume leg as an example, I wouldn’t be able to unravel the top piece without picking out each stitch one by one, as I’d be unravelling in the same direction as I’d knit and it would be very time consuming.  I would unravel down the lower (leg) piece as that would be going opposite the knitting and would frog easily.

So if I had a leg that was 10 rows too long, I would separate the work onto two sets of needles and then unravel until I’d removed 11 rows.  The grafting row will account for the difference, “putting back” one row as it joins the two halves together.