Disaster ... faced and averted

I spoke too soon and too smugly about not having made any mistakes in the lace so far. (Yeah, ya'll probably saw that coming). Last night I had a minor disaster. I was two stitches short in the row I was working, in two different pattern repeats. The first time it happened, I just fluffed some fix (probably an M1 [make one], I don't remember now) and went on. But when I discovered the second mistake in the end of the same row, I didn't want to leave them both. My experience with the first attempt is that once that happens, it just goes downhill from there.

So I decided I was going to unknit this row and fix it. And that's when the real crisis ensued. I was just having a very hard time properly unknitting that row. Several times I thought I'd dropped stitches that might be yarn-overs, but wasn't sure. Several times I ended up with two loops instead of one where one stitch should be, and wasn't sure what I did.

In my defense, I was extraordinarily tired last night, and probably shouldn't have been even trying to fix it. I finally gave up, left it in it's disastrous state and went to bed, assuming that today I'd have to bite the bullet and rip it all out.

Oh, what a difference a good night's sleep and daylight can bring. This morning I tackled it again, but all the things that made no sense to me last night started making sense this morning. I realized that my previous row was a purl row on the wrong side, which means that I should be ripping back to solid stitches, no yarn-overs. So I didn't have to worry about them.

I also got smart and began really studying the stitches, not just counting. I finally began to be able to recognize stitches just by looking at them ("this is a knit 2 together, so when I unknit it, I should have two loops on the left needle instead of one"), and distinguish where problems were - to 'read the knitting' as they say, a skill that has to date eluded me with lacy stuff. I can do that in my knitting with larger yarns (even socks), but once you get into tiny stitches and the laciness of yarn-overs and such, I was getting very confused.

I unknit the entire row, then went back through comparing it with the chart, and figuring out which stitches were in fact still there, and which ones were missing. I'm no expert at it yet, but it all began to make sense, and I was able to isolate the problems.

It turned out that whole disaster occurred because I'd missed two yarnovers in the previous pattern row. That was it. Just forgot to make a couple yarnovers. That seems to be a bad habit of mine.


I 'fixed it' - so to speak. I was able to reknit the row, picking up yarn from the row below to 'create' the missing yarnovers. It's obviously not a perfect fix. The missing yarn-over should have been two rows below, then purled on the previous wrong-side row, making the large 'hole' that creates the lacy effect; picking up a horizontal bar from only one row below to replace it only fixes my stitch count as a mostly solid stitch, losing that particular lace 'hole' for that row.

But I got my stitch count back on track, everything in the right place, and I don't believe those missed yarn-over fixes will have a totally catastrophic impact on the final result (as long as I don't keep on doing it). It will show if looked for, but if I can stay more or less on track through the rest of it, I don't think they're going to be very noticeable in the greater scheme of things.

Once I got it fixed this morning, I set it aside. I'm not going back to work on it till tonight, because I think I learned my lesson ... I think I'm going to run a lifeline this time. Although I think getting tiny lace stitches back on the needle even with a lifeline could be a huge headache, I still think it would better than getting two feet into this thing and then having something disastrous happen that causes me to have to rip the whole thing out. That would just make me suicidal. (hence the term lifeline, I suppose).

So. No more cockiness with lace. (Although I was proud of myself for fixing it). Tonight, life line, then more knitting. (although probably not much - Ghost Hunters is on, and I love that show, and I've learned I really can't knit lace while watching an engaging TV show that I actually want to see, not just listen to). And I'm going to pay much more attention from here on out. Because really - I don't mind having the occasional mistake in a piece of knitting that only 'sorta' gets fixed, but when it's lace, I don't want to just keep screwing up over and over - enough of those will ruin the design, which is the point of knitting lace; if I'm going to tackle this stuff, I want to do a better job than that.