Sunday 5 July 2020

Weekend Frog: A Cautionary Tale

I'm currently knitting a new version of this using the same yarn, in cream/beige. It's not very interesting yet, but I am going to add a racer back when I get to the top, when it will become a bit more challenging.

In search of a challenge, therefore, I pulled out this. It's been a while since I worked on it; it may even be that I haven't touched it since 2018. It's a 12 row lace repeat that patterns on every side, although once you get into the rhythm of it, as I remembered today, it is quite straightforward.

What was less straightforward was working out where on earth I had stopped, on the pattern. I remember vividly thinking, you need to make sure you stop this in a place that is obvious so you can pick it up again. Well, good thinking past Sally, but would it have killed you to write it down in your project notes? I couldn't figure it out. I was staring at it for over an hour. It helped when I realised I had finished on a wrong side row - this epiphany took a good 20 minutes to arrive, which is utterly tragic. In the end, I counted the stitches and did some pattern maths, and worked out I had finished on a row 6. I duly began knitting row 7, only to realise that, probably the reason why I had had such trouble is that I had messed up the last row I had knitted, and managed to knit half the row from one pattern row and the other half from another. So I tinked back the new knitting. I tinked back part of the row of the old. I knitted anew. It all came together.

This morning, I picked it up and started again. I have no idea what went wrong, but it went really wrong, very quickly. This is a pattern of carefully placed circles and it's not forgiving of mistakes. I tried tinking but I had lost track of where I'd restarted and decided that it was a lost cause, since I'd clearly not restarted in the right place and couldn't work out where it should be. So I frogged the lot. Except, it's a pure silk single, so I frogged about half of it, cut the yarn and gave the rest to the kittens to play with, because it was getting a bit ratty - now I see that I've frogged it before, the first time I tried.

Maybe I should give this up as a lost cause .... but, third time lucky. 

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