Frogging lace sucks.

Note to self: Never get cocky. The second I get over-confident and think I know what I’m doing with this knitting stuff the knitting gods smite me.

So I sit down for the perfect afternoon of knitting and bad tv – Matt’s out on the boat fishing, Dexter has a bone, and I finally have the mental capacity to pick up the lace I hadn’t worked on in 2 weeks. So I take a look at it to try to figure out what row I’m on (mistake #1: not using a row counter. What the hell was I thinking with that one?! Just because I didn’t need one for the Adamas does not mean that I could handle this.) and I notice that half of the shawl looks like this:

When it should look like this:


And this is not a shawl I can fudge. This is for my grandma. My knitting guru. Someone who would not only notice the error but question why I didn’t go back and fix it. I had no choice but to rip. Which wouldn’t have been a horrible thing if I had used lifelines like I had done with the Adamas. (mistake #2: I thought that since I didn’t need the lifelines in Adamas there’s no way I’d need them with this, much simpler, lace pattern. HA! I didn’t know the cardinal rule of lace knitting - if you use lifelines you won’t need them. If you don’t use them you will.)

I’m sure I made the mistake about 13 rows back during the car knitting when we got out to get grub. I stopped mid row came back in and started knitting on a different row of the pattern. (Why, oh, why did I not use a row counter?)

Just breathe.


Because I had no lifeline (I am stoopid) I had to rip to the only point where I was certain of where I was in the pattern… the increase row…. 17 rows in total.

Keep breathing….


Ok. It’s back on the needles. That wasn’t so bad! I can do this….


So then I proceed to do the increase row, and knit the plain row afterwards… adding the stitch markers as I went…. And I get to the end of the round and I’m missing 4 stitches. (Mistake #3: not counting the stitches I just laboriously put back on the needles before starting up with the knitting again. Did I seriously think I had made NO mistakes in picking up 96 lace stitches??? That I didn’t miss at least a yarn over or 2?!)

I couldn’t handle ripping it out again. I just couldn’t do it. So I slipped each stitch individually onto the circular needle… lining up where the patterns should be with the rows below. Where the center stitch didn’t line up I knew I had missed a stitch somewhere…. luckily I found one that was just hanging there… but the other one had disappeared somewhere into the lace. From there on the next lace row whenever I had only 7 stitches between the markers instead of 8 I just omitted the knit 2 together. It’s not perfect… but it worked out ok.

Here’s the shawl now (after staying up until midnight knitting like a madwoman determined to get back to the point at which I started):


Notice the row counter? There is no lifeline, though. I’ll add one of those in after this pattern repeat.

It is possible that I will never learn…..