Metalouse Shawl from Knit Nirvana - Day 2

I cheated...

I’m ready to admit it—I cheated on Stephen West.

Not personally, of course—I’ve never even met the man, although he seems like a nice guy and I wouldn’t turn down the chance to say hello—but I have cheated on his fine pattern.

You never see these things coming—they just happen.  A slip here, a straying attention there, and POOF, you get to a crucial design juncture in the middle of your very busy writers conference a day behind your blog schedule and discover your “right side” is on your “wrong side.”  

You shake your needles in the air, grunt, say unprofessional and immoral things no one outside the knitting community understands (“Allie, its just yarn…”).  You quietly calculate how long it’s going to take you to rip those multiple loooooong rows out and replace them, putting you that much further behind your posting schedule, not to mention the WRITERLY things you’re supposed to be doing while you are here at your Very Important Conference.

Then, suddenly, while you aren’t even looking, you become a woman of questionable knitting morals.  You ask yourself slippery questions like “Can these rows be saved without frogging?  and the most dangerous of all — “Will anyone ever really notice?”

You mutter to yourself in hotel elevators on the way to lunch with your editor.  You cringe and plot over your meal, one foot in the writer’s world, one foot in the knitter’s world.  You wonder how much you can get away with before anyone will notice.

And then, when you get back to your hotel room, you look—really look—at the pattern and the yarn to grasp the bigger picture.  What’s the endgame?  What design is taking shape here and can it still take shape from what I’ve got?

You realize, with a smirk, that if you simply clip the yarn (gasp!) and start at the other end, it can all be saved with only a minor wrong row that really doesn’t show.  All is not lost.  You don’t have to rip out hours worth of work if you can live with a minor mis-step that no one will likely know is there…except you.

And, of course Stephen West, who will probably see it at 100 paces and glare at you.

Maybe not. Like I said, he seems like a nice guy, and what knitter hasn’t cheated?

I can’t decide if I feel clever or devious.  Maybe both.