So that Evenstar shawl I’ve been knitting. It’s pretty huge right now – I’m on the last clue before the beaded border, and I’m really starting to believe that this shawl will be 5′ across when blocked.
I’ve been doing most of my knitting at work. I work in the dark. This hadn’t been a problem, and for some silly reason, I felt myself too good for lifelines. I regarded them as training wheels – I don’t need those any more, I can do this! Well, now I think they are more like PFDs: something that might feel cumbersome, but is definitely needed because you never know when your boat might flip over.
There have been mistakes. These mistakes have all been on the last repeat. Maybe I get excited about the new row that is coming, and mess up the last few stitches, or who knows what.
I saw a mistake about 4 rows down from where I was one day. Remember that this shawl is at about 600 stitches around. I was not going to rip back that many stitches! I dropped the stitches in question, and fixed the mistake (I missed a YO, which left a blip in a YO border in the pattern).
A few days later, I noticed a bigger mistake. I couldn’t tell if it was further down than the first mistake (because I’d knitted on it for a few days) or in the same spot. So I dropped those stitches down, and tried to fix. It was big and scary, I was dropping 7 rows in a complicated lace pattern, but I persevered. When I had finished, the mistake was gone, but I’d messed up the stuff beside it pretty badly. The ‘stuff beside’ is the main motif of the Evenstar shawl, the stitches that look like Arwen’s pendant from the movies.
I dropped again, this time dropping and re-knitting the Evenstar bit. I was not looking forward to it, I put off starting by knitting a whole row of the shawl, till I got around to that part again. The Evenstar motif has a wacky little increase/decrease where you end up making 7 stitches in one group. It was that part that I didn’t want to do without the end of the yarn being free.
But… I managed! I showed my knitting who was boss!
No photos of the scary process, because I didn’t want to pick it up and put it down and disturb it by getting the camera. All is well – I’m hoping blocking will even it out a bit where tension changed (I tended to re-knit with smaller needles than I’m using on the whole thing, because it made maneuvering easier) and if I need to, I may employ some judicious duplicate stitch.
It was stressful, but I was very proud of myself for not crying, not sticking it in the back of a drawer, or martyring myself by ripping back to the easiest place to pick up stitches, the stockingette band 71 rows below.
