We're all mad here.

Paint the White Roses Red

Mistakes happen. Some beyond our control. Create a blog entry (or static item) telling of such a time(s) that has happened and what you did to rectify the situation (if any). (<1000 words)

I knit. I will now pause so the assembled can make any pertinant jokes, here. Yes, Joy (here, Joy refers to a sister who I've always teased about stash and stash acquisition expiditions, which is what knitters do at yarn stores or online shops), I have my own stash, now. One of these days, I'll even organize it.

Not only do I knit, but I knit lace. With lace weight yarn. This means, I take my sanity into my hands every time I start a project. My current lace weight lace knitting project also includes beads. Beads are evil. At present, I have twenty rows left of my project plus the bind off. On my next row, I will place 125 beads, as well as around 150 beads apiece on three additional rows. This means, the row of around 500 stitches, which if I was simply knitting would take about twenty minutes, will instead take roughly three hours (give or take an eternity).

But why do I bring this up after a prompt about mistakes? Because I am currently on the third time I've knitted the past four rows. Because of various tangles which involved a giant mistake and then changing colors and not liking the way that changing colors looked when I was striping them, and then changing them again so that I simply started the new color and gave up completely on the original plan.

Of course, there are ways to fix mistakes in knitting. Or perhaps prepare so that they are lessened. Sometimes, we can purposely ladder down, fix a dropped stitch or a missing yarn over, and then knit back up. I've done that in this project, actually, when I realized that I'd made a mistake in the mesh about five rows back.

For this particular tangle, I originally tried to unknit. In other words, I carefully took each stitch off the needle, threading the needle into the previous row. This did not work. It resulted in dropped stitches. Which is when a stitch goes down in a ladder, kind of like a ladder on a pair of nylons. This results in holes that can potentially end up back at the beginning of the piece.

Fortunately, I had a lifeline. Before I started the past four rows, I used some crochet cotton and threaded it through every single stitch, so that they were caught and wouldn't ladder down any further. And when I saw I couldn't unknit cleanly, I frogged (when you give up, pull out your needle and pull back your knitting, it's called ripping—and so I rip it (ribbit) so we call it frogging) back to the lifeline.

This produced flying beads. Have I mentioned recently that beads are evil? And I don't know how many extra beads I'll have, so I had to gather all the flying beads. Fortunately, I had anticipated this possible issue, and had ripped into a big bowl. Only a few escaped and got onto my blanket.

I counted, was only missing two, which I found upon a recount. I didn't count again because I was pretty certain that I would be off again. I put them back in their container. If I get to the end and don't have enough I'm going to have to crawl around the floor for a while.

And now, I'm trying to knit forward again. Of course, the problem with that is that I'm so sick and tired of these rows. And they're long. And there's no guarantee that I'll actually get them right this time.

Mistakes in knitting are not the end of the world. There are certain philosophies of thought that say that every piece should have some mistake in it to prove that the maker is not so full of hubris as to make something perfect.

They're frustrating, though. Sometimes, knitting goes into time out for a while so I can calm down. Sometimes frog it to the beginning. Sometimes I restart five or six times. But most of the time, I just pick it back up and go on.

word count: 680

FWIW ▼

For those curious, here's a link to this project:

https://www.ravelry.com/projects/teowyn/wild-swan

and to a finished photo

https://link.shutterfly.com/WHIwcwnrU4