The long way around; it's inevitable

I thought Bright Navy looked nice with these other colors and planned to work this design with a few more alternating foreground and background colors than the blanket pattern suggests. Yesterday Bright Navy seemed fine when I was working it and when I’d worked past it. For the background I was thinking colors that might be seen in the sky. 

Before, with navy stripes - so stark!

Today, however, it’s overcast outside. As soon as I glimpsed the partial block I thought the navy looked out of place and so very close to black. After a while this bothered me enough to decide the navy was coming out. But since I’d worked 8 stripes past the stripes that included navy I decided instead of ripping all that out I’d pull out the section with the navy stripes and rework those and then re-attach the part of the pattern coming afterward. Shouldn't be too much of a problem.  It's not like I don't have a procession of loose ends hanging off the side from adding new colors.  Just gonna start by yanking on a navy one...

No more navy, anyway...

It’s been an adventure. And by now I’m sure, while less satisfying, it would have been a lot less challenging and time consuming to rip everything back to where the navy started and re-do it all, rather than saving and grafting - especially since the top row of each stripe has specific patterns of knits and purls. Since I  was replacing the bottom row with the grafting (the WS row worked p to last st then k1) that sounded easy enough.  Really just plain stockinette from the RS.  Except once I had it nearly attached I realized I hadn’t accounted for losing the k & p design in the upper row.




So starting over again I thought back to but didn't actually look up a techknitter article in Interweave Knits.  I remembered the overall gist of the advice being that no matter whether you were trying to kitchener in stockinette st, garter, or ribbing, by looking at the stitches on your front and back needles as they are facing you and calling what you see either knit or purl, the stitch you are creating with kitchener stitch is going to first pass through the loop as the opposite of the stitch you want to result.  It then passes through in the direction (knitwise or purlwise) that would be the same as the stitch you're trying to create.  So to get a knit stitch you're purling on and then (after addressing 2 loops on the back needle) knitting off.  The back needle in stockinette stitch will have purl bumps facing you.  To get uninterrupted smooth stockinette that you want for a nice toe, those needle's stitches require a knit on and purl off (for a single loop with 2 sts from the front worked in between).  It's confusing and I may not be helping - sorry!  I thought about it very very carefully and experimented a bit and found that when I wanted to switch from knit to purl I had to treat the back needle loops the same way as the front needle loops.  So I kept saying to myself, "knit off, purl on."  Adding to the confusion is that I've always seen the mantra written knit off, purl on and purl off, knit on.  But that's dealing with 2 stitches in a row on both the front and back needles.  When you are considering how a single stitch is going to be completed you aren't dealing with the initial first stitch you took off each needle or the last stitch you removed.  Since the row I was adding was all knit the standard instruction worked for that.  And the places where the stitch in the upper row was held as a knit the regular instruction produced that every time.  But when I needed the stop stitch to be a purl instead to create the ridge patterns it worked to repeat the instruction sequence for the front needle on the back needle, too.  Clear as mud, I'm sure!

See how the star disappears when you look straight at it?  Only about two inches left to go, then put on a narrow border; that's 4 inches of progress since this morning.  I'm just too drowsy to keep moving tonight, though.