I hate bobbles.

I was trying to remember this morning on what project I had bobbled before. Eventually it came to me that it was the Sweater On Your Head Hat. (AWESOME hat.) It pained me to keep turning the work around and around to knit and purl on just a few stitches. As I was remembering that, it occurred to me I had seen an article that might help me with my Irish Cables Folk Bag Bobble Trim problem. A few key words typed into Google (much quicker than looking through all my magazine indexes) and I was there -- Vogue IK Winter 2002 and Shirley Paden's article on "knitting backwards." (Have I mentioned lately how much I love Shirley Paden?)

It worked! Instead of turning my bobbles and purling back, I reverse knitted them from left to right and it was a beautiful thing. The article even included instructions for doing a P2tog and P2togtbl from the front side. I had a bit of a hard time getting the hang of reverse P2togtbl, and, truly, my first couple bobbles were very awkwardly executed. By Bobble Seven, though, I was sailing.

Hooray!

I USED to hate bobbles.