Metalouse Shawl from Knit Nirvana - Day 3

Bet you saw this coming...

You know how I’m always saying life is like knitting and knitting is like life?

Just like in life, cheating in knitting almost always comes back to bite you.  There I was, happily stitching along in my self-congratulatory cleverness, thinking I’d outwitted my own mistake.  It only took five or six more rows, however, for me to realize that NO, I could not just clip the yarn and start from the opposite end.  My right and wrong sides were correct back when I thought I’d switched them  In correcting an error that wasn’t really there, I just made a whole host of new ones.  

This meant…you guessed it…ripping out twice as many rows as I would have if I’d just admitted my mistake and gone back to make it right.  Sigh.  Another life lesson confirmed in knitting.  Cheaters never prosper—they only frog and tink.

My original error was holding the yarn on the wrong side of my work when I slipped the stitches.  Because I was pearling, I held it to the front.   But I was working on the right side—I should have held it to the back.  Had I really stopped to examine my work, I’d have seen it.  But no, I was too engrossed in progress to pay sufficient attention to process.

Mea culpa, DestiKNITters, I have led you astray.  Learn from me.  Ten 200+ stitch rows takes a LONG time to rip out and redo.  Save yourselves!

Students of my time management for writers class are probably laughing right now, recalling a favorite book title I often quote: "If You Haven't Got the Time to Do it Right, When Will You Find the Time to Do it Over?"

Island Knits Shoulder Wrap from Island Knits - Day 3

Pride cometh before a frog...

I like to think of myself as a skilled knitter.  I envision myself as having a fair amount of what I call “stitch intuition”—the ability to look at a pattern or work-in-progress and sense that something isn’t quite right.  The experience needed to identify and adjust for a typo in a pattern, to adapt for a fiber substitution, or to look at a mistake and know how to fix it.

Yeah, you’d think.

Why, why is it always the simplest patterns that do me in??

I’ve been staring at the shape of this shawl, dismissing the growing sense that something didn’t look right.  It needed to slope more gently, to be wider, to look less like a triangle and more like an arc.   Still, I stitched happily along with my big, fast needles and my soft, drapey yarn.

Until last night.  Now, yesterday wasn’t a particularly good day so you know the knitting’s going to kick you when you're down.  When you turn to your knitting for solace?  Oh, that’s when she turns on you.

I stared at the shawl again, uneasy.  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I catch the second sentence in the pattern.  The entire pattern is only four sentences long, for crying out loud, it wasn’t like I was asked to absorb an encyclopedia.  I’m a publishing professional; I should be able to handle four-sentence instructions.

There, tucked into the middle sentence, were the words “and end.”  As in “increase 1 stitch at the beginning and end of each row.”  I had increased at the beginning of each row, but neglected to catch on that I needed to increase at the end of each row as well.

We will not recount the nasty things I said as I ripped out a full half of this project.  Sufficeth to say, it wasn’t anything soft or virtuous.   Thank heavens these are big needles.  If I’m lucky I can knit fast enough to catch up.