Getting there!

Thank you everyone for your ideas (and commiserations to Julie for the height of her husband...knee-ectomy comes to mind ;) I started off carefully undoing my long-tail cast on at SnB on Tuesday night, with the guidance and support of Taph, Spidey and Judes. I finally made it to the end of the row (which took ages), pulled and... bugger - nothing! Unravelling from the bottom up clearly wasn't going to work. Damn.

On Wednesday I threaded my 4.5mm bamboo circular needle through each stitch in the last row of stocking stitch fabric, snipped the first stitch in the next row down, and laboriously unpicked the first row of 1x1 ribbing. Finally, the band came off! I then skeined it, attached my new ball of Jet to the live stitches, and knit down in stocking stitch! There is now an extra 15 cm of jumper body (on the front half, anyway), and I'm nearly finished the ribbing - hurrah! It looks really good, too - there's a slight line where the stitches were picked up, but I suspect this will disappear once the jumper is washed.

So I still need to do the back half (I decided against knitting it in the round - since I knit the jumper as flat pieces, and I know my tension is a little different when I knit on circulars.). Hubby is away in Melbourne this week, so he knows nothing... I like to do all these alterations before he gets back this afternoon, and then not say anything (that bit will be hard!), so when he next puts on the jumper he'll be all like - "Woooah, the jumper GREW!" and I can mess with his mind and freak him out a bit. However this is looking less likely given my current work load, and my mother & her husband planning on visiting this morning somewhat unexpectedly.