Alpaca Grief

My little cousin is pregnant and any knitter knows...that means I have a project!  I was excited for this one.  I went off to The Needle Emporium to find my yarn after speaking secretly to my cousin's mom - she would like a dove grey blanket and loves cable knit stuff.  Easy enough. She is a girl who likes things of a better quality so I didn't want to use a basic acrylic yarn that I knew I could find scads of at Walmart and Michaels. I found a lovely grey color in the Berocco Ultra Alpaca and knew the pattern I was going to use.

Well.  You know what they say about the best laid plans.

It didn't work.  Several rows and a few cables in to the pattern I was all set to go gung ho with and it became painfully clear it just wasn't working.  I don't know if it was the pattern or the yarn or me or what, but it wasn't going to happen so I ripped it all out, rewound my yarn and hopped online in search of a new pattern to use.  I found the Red Cable Blanket and thought, hey, that looks perfect.

Well. I was wrong.

Turns out the pattern was missing a crucial step.  Or it was written in a confusing way. Pattern reads, repeat rows 1 and 2 for 8 rows and then every 8th row, do a cable row.  Which in my way of reading, if you are repeating rows 1 and 2 for 8 rows, you are doing the cable row after the 8th row, not on it. That being the case, that would mean you are starting the pattern repeat on the wrong side, so you actually have to do another row 2 after the cable row to put you back on track. I rewrote it thusly...

CO 146
Row 1 - (K2, P2, K6, P2), K2
Row 2 - (P2, K2, P6, K2)
Repeat  3 more times, total 8 rows
Row 9 - (K2, P2, CBL, P2)
Row 10 - same as row 2
CBL = sl 3 to cable needle, hold to front, K3, K3 from cable needle.

It worked!  There wasn't a whole lot of info on the site beyond that, such as yardage and all such, so off I went, cabling away, measuring as I went.  Knit, knit, knit.  I don't find cabling particularly difficult but man I was sick of it by the end of this blanket.  Finally finished, I bound off and set to blocking it.  Blocking finished a day later, removed the pins....

Oh. Oh no.

It was flat.  Limp.  Nicely drapey, but it was a cable blanket and that was not the objective.  I didn't realize just how much alpaca stretches and this just looked ironed.  Flat and ironed and not what I expected at all.  But what could I do?  It still looked nice, so I folded it up and set it aside, disappointed but knowing that my cousin will still appreciate the gift.

It bugged me, though.  Every time I glanced at it, it bugged me.  There has to be a way to undo my overblocking I thought.  Back to the internet I went.  Searched, and searched and searched.  There are countless articles about how to block knitting, but nothing about how to unblock it.

What's a knitter to do but experiment?  I figured, I don't really have much to lose at this point, so back in the blocking bucket it went and I let it soak really well this time, for over half an hour.  I pushed all the excess water out and laid it out carefully on the blocking mats, and row by row, cable by cable, I gently "smooshed" it back to more of the shape I wanted.  Then all I could do was wait. It took 2 days to dry this time since it was so wet to start with but I was definitely happier with the look of the cables and ribs afterwards:

Before

After

As you see from the top picture, it was very flat, the cables almost looking sharp and embossed, and the ribs were very far apart, stretching the stitches open around the cables.  The bottom picture is more what I was going for, softer looking with a bit of "puff" to the cables.  Not exactly, but better.

There is a catch though.  Of course there is!  Now that it wasn't stretched as wide, the proportions are off.  It's longer than it should be.  That irritates and disappoints me, but not a whole lot to be done about it now.  In the future if I ever redo this pattern, I would definitely cast on a lot more stitches than this pattern called for.  And I would do a swatch.  This was my first time blocking such a large item and I was shocked at how much the look, feel and size changed with this particular yarn.  Swatches using different blocking methods and strengths would have prevented me a lot of alpaca grief.