I Knew Things Were Going Too Well

I started working on a lace shawl just over a week ago. It was started because I needed a break from knitting socks which had been taking up all my knitting time for some weeks. The first hundred or so rows were completed pretty quickly but as the shawl grew it took longer and longer to knit each row until it got to the stage yesterday where each row was taking something like 20 minutes to complete. But even though the rows were taking longer to complete, the actual pattern over these stitches was very easy to follow and soon became imprinted on my mind so that minimal viewing of the pattern charts was necessary.

Things were going smoothly until about 5.30 this evening when I discovered that there were some mistakes in the shawl. I started to unpick it stitch by stitch but with almost 500 stitches to the row, trying to find out where the errors occurred was going to take forever. So I did the unthinkable. I pulled the needle (I'm using a circular one because they are the best thing to use for shawls) from the shawl and started to unravel the whole shawl.

It may seem a somewhat extreme to do this but I really don't have the ability to concentrate on the shawl for the length of time necessary to unpick it a stitch at a time to find the errors. I often resort to this when knitting lace because it can be so easy to make a mistake which can take forever to find. Admittedly I have never managed to get so far with a shawl before making one of these catastrophic mistakes, but I know that the shawl will probably be better second time around and I am now more aware of the likely problem areas of the pattern.

I have already started knitting again and already have completed 13 rows of the first chart. It is likely that I may finish the first chart this evening and possibly even start the second one. Hopefully, this time I will be able to work on the shawl without having to resort to pulling the needle out.

A Bad Day With The Knitting

It's been another hot day and I am flagging in the heat. They say it's going to be hotter tomorrow and I know that if I am going to venture out it will have to be early in the morning because I am finding it difficult to deal with outside temperatures after about 10.30 in the morning.

The net result of this is that I have been spending a lot of time indoors knitting and watching DVDs. I would love to say that the knitting was going well, but after a period of rapid progress on the shawl that I am knitting things have slowed down dramatically over the last couple of days. I keep making mistakes and not spotting them until I have done several more rows. This means that I have to unpick the knitting stitch by stitch and this is a soul destroying task when you have to do it more than once. I am on my second major unpicking stint at the moment and after working at it for about an hour this afternoon, I put my knitting down and I have not touched it since.

I will probably return to it tomorrow, but I know that I am going to have to take a bit more care when I start the row in which I keep making the errors. This will mean sitting in a silent room, no television, DVD, radio or CD to distract me, and knit each stitch after carefully referencing the chart. I know that I can get it right in the end.

Sometimes I ask myself why I chose to knit such complicated lace patterns, but I suppose that it is because I have always faced up to a challenge and knitting is after all just two types of stitches; it's just what you do with them that makes something fancy rather than plain.

And knitting is one of the life-saving things in my life. I would be totally lost without it.