Warning!

This blog post is not for the faint of heart. Please proceed with caution. If at any time during your reading, you feel dizzy or nauseous, please stop reading, put your head between your knees, and take a few deep calming breaths while chanting, "At least this didn't happen to me..." You have been warned.

The wonky sweater bottom got to me kids. I knew I couldn't let it go. I'm neurotic like that. I began searching the intraweb for some ways to fix a problem like this. And really, there aren't any. I began experimenting with a few ideas on some old gauge swatches (see they do come in handy). I unraveled from the bottom up. Time consuming but do able. I knit from the middle down. Thankfully this works because the sweater is all stockinette stitch. I cut. I sewed. I read more. The best advice seemed to be to cut off the offending part, re-knit, and then graft together. But since I can knit from the top down or the bottom up and get the same effect either way I didn't want to do any grafting. I'm anti-grafting. The following surgery was devised after a glass of champagne and a lot of positive self talk.

How to Fix a Wonky Bottom Half of Sweater:

Insert a lifeline where you want to rip out to. In my case it was the first correctly executed row of purl stitches.
Get out your Crayola scissors (I assume that other scissors will work, of course). Snip a stitch from a row below your lifeline. I cut this one several rows below but I went back and snipped directly below my lifeline and it worked fine. I just didn't want any more major problems. Better to error to the side of caution and all that.
Begin ripping out.
This took awhile because I had to find both ends of the yarn. The first row had to be carefully unpicked.
Allow your crazed cat to come and stand in the middle of your delicate operation.
Allow her to then lie on your arm so that you have to hunch over a half ripped sweater and continue to pull out your yarn.

Separate the good from the ugly (note that crazed cat hasn't moved yet and that you could also stand to get a better pair of socks).
Rip, rip, rip, rip, rip, rip, rip, rip...
Store ripped yarn neatly in a jug designed for holding yarn (this is optional, you could re-wind it).
Make sure you have ripped back to the lifeline. This may require more snipping and ripping. Insert a needle into the row with the lifeline. Pull out the lifeline. Knit on dudes.
It absolutely looks like nothing is wrong. Now I can re-knit the 9.5 inches until the bottom where I will add 2 inches of ribbing and then bind off. I slept much better last night knowing my sweater wasn't going to look like arse.