Whomp!
That was the sound of the knitting goddess whomping me on the head for the sin of hubris. I’m knitting the Forest Canopy Shawl, which I keep referring to as an easy lace pattern. It has 8 pattern rows, half of which are straight purl back rows, and a 5th row is plain knit, so there are only really 3 rows that you have to pay attention to. Should be easy, right?
On top of that, I’m getting close to the end, and have what I think is enough yarn for a couple more repeats and then the 8 row border pattern, which is just repeated once. I’ve been trying to think out how I could safely use as much of the Zephyr lace yarn to make the shawl as large as possible, and still have enough for the border. I finally came upon the brilliant idea of using my drug-dealers scale. I finished a row 8, weighed the remaining ball of yarn, then started in on another pattern repeat. My plan is to finish another repeat, weigh it again, then I should be able to calculate roughly how many repeats I can get out of it. There will be a little fudging with this, as of course the rows get lonnnnger with each repeat, but it should be better than just guessing. I was feeling pretty proud of myself for coming up with this plan. Even a little above average, I would say.
So I’m knitting merrily along, about 3/4 across a loooonnng row 5, and discovered I’d somehow dropped a stitch or something screwy. I haven’t been using lifelines with this one, as it’s a pretty easy pattern to tell when you’ve goofed up. (More hubris.) The only hope was to tink back, stitch by stitch, across lonnnnnggg rows until I got to where I’d fracked it up. I ended up unknitting 3 rows before I found it. Somehow I’d skipped 3 yarnovers all in one little inch long section. I probably didn’t forget to do them, but somehow dropped them on the purl back row. I apparently screwed up the “easy” purl back row. I’m also more than a little embarrassed to admit that it took me that long to figure out that it was dropped yarnovers. Those actually are fairly easy to fix without tinking back, if you know where they should go. An average knitter could probably figure that out.
There are no photos of this. A blob of knitted lace done correctly doesn’t look much different in a photo from a blob of knitted lace with mistakes. Just imagine them, OK?
This is where a knitting blog turned out to be a blessing. I had the very brief, but very definitely serious thought of ripping the whole thing out into a pile of ramen yarn, then taking it to the backyard and burning it. Except I’d have to admit to all of you that I did it. Sooner or later somebody would comment “whatever happened to that pretty green lace shawl you were knitting”, and I’d have to confess. So I tinked. I tinked three very loooonnnnnnnngggg rows. And I reknit, and now I’m back to that row 5. I still don’t know how many repeats I can squeak out of this baby. I’m off to knit rows 6-7-8.