Stole Update

I went home last night, looked at the stole and thought it didn’t look too bad, except for a couple of mistakes in the diamond pattern (one on each side to be exact). Figuring it would be easier to open just that panel and fix it, this is what I did. Yeah. Opened the panel. Opened it right up. What a good idea. Yeah. Just as I was beginning to think that lace wasn’t all that bad, I opened a panel. With arans, this is not a problem. You open the panel, re-knit it and life goes on. Theoretically, this should be the same with lace, but those little YOs are just sitting there laughing at you as you open them up. Bwahahahahahaha! We have a live one now! Let’s just disappear! And that, my friends, is just what they did. Even when I caught the little buggers before they just dropped off, I wound up with the strangest, most inexplicable stitch counts in that panel. I opened even more in the hopes of eventually hitting the right number, suddenly I had 2 more, but this was too many, then three were missing, then they came back, then one went missing…you get the point.

The other thing about lace, and this is important, you can’t just “fix it”. Too few stitches? M1 is not an option. Too many? K2togging is not an option. It messes with the pattern and the pattern is the whole point. Anything else, you can fix easily, but lace laughs in the face of quick fixes. In short, I’ve come to the conclusion that lace is evil and it likes it that way.

Now, I may be blond (sometimes more than others), but I am capable of learning. Having been here before, I decided that the speediest way of fixing the problem would be to frog the 21 rows of pattern that I had already done and re-knit the piece. This is what I did. It was a good idea. I managed to re-knit 12 rows last night. Apparently I also learned quite a lot between knitting it the first time and creating my own excel chart because it looks ever so much better now. Even the bits that looked fine before look better. The pattern is coming out clearer and it will take less blocking to get it to look good. When I finish the first pattern repeat, I’ll stretch it and take pictures…

providing I ever get the first repeat done that is. I’m not naïve. This is lace. Pink lace. It hasn’t finished with me yet. Can one ever be prepared enough to do battle with pink lace and win?

I think not.