Making the Most of Mistakes

I’ve been so happy with my Find Your Fade Shawl.  I’m on the last skein of yarn and have set a new goal of knitting three rows a day….  And then the unthinkable. Something every knitter fears. I missed part of the pattern.  I skipped fourteen rows!  

The funny thing is, I had been wondering why I had used so little yarn of the second-to-last skein (Par Avion by October House).  But I didn’t go back and look at the pattern until yesterday. Sigh.

To Rip Out or Not

Every knitter has to answer this question with almost every project: to rip out or not. To fix or to not fix.  Can I live with that mistake? All these questions go through our minds at least a few times with every project.  Sometimes an irregular stitch can be overlooked but sometimes it’s just too glaringly obvious.

I could have forgotten about those fourteen rows.  Easily. But I love the Par Avion colorway. It’s perhaps my favorite in the entire Fade.  So I didn’t want it to not get it’s showcase rows.  And I wanted to knit the entire pattern; I didn’t want it to  look uneven.

And so I decided to rip back to the beginning of the Par Avion skein – right after the color melding.

A New Skill

I dreaded frogging all the work I’d done – about 3-4 inches of the work with Par Avion and Tropic, the last colorway.  So I looked for tutorials online about feeding a lifeline through the stitches before ripping it all out. I had done this before but not with garter stitch.  

Then I found a great video where you learn how to just pick up all those stitches with a long needle.  Hallelujah! I took the needle out of the live stitches and tediously started weaving it through all those tiny (fingering weight – arg!) stitches.  This took some time.  

So Easily Forgotten

The thing about frogging, even just 3-4 inches….  That’s a lot of yarn. And yarn from two different skeins.   I quickly had knots forming and a general mess of yarn. After ten minutes of failing to untangle a portion of it, I did the unthinkable: I cut the yarn.  But I have plenty of it, so no worries. And thankfully, I only had to cut it once. I was able to meticulously untangle the rest and wind it into small little balls to use later.  

Time Lost

I had to re-knit the last few rows of the color melting and then I was on to those fourteen missing rows of Par Avion garter stitch.  Yes, I’ve lost valuable time – a month? – of knitting. But now I’ll rest easy. Now that lovely Par Avion will be knit up in all of it’s gorgeous glory!  And the pattern will be knit correctly!

Again, deciding what one can live with or not live with is a very common question every knitter must ask.  Sure, you waste time, but isn’t it part of the process? No one is perfect and it’s sometimes impossible to get things right on the first go-around.  And I know this very, very well.

I’m a far from perfect knitter!!  And look on the bright side: I learned a new skill of rescuing stitches!