Don't get me wrong. The lace is fine. The yarn is fine. It is the knitter I must take issue with.
The problem with the rhythm of lace is that it gets inside you and pretty soon you feel you know the lace, and you are moving along knitting quite happily. Then you knit the next row, and realize that hey, those holes are not where they are supposed to be. There ought to be no places where the decreases sections sit side by side. There ought to be lovely decreases followed by sweet increases and even though you know this in your heart of hearts, the chart says so, and if you were following the word directions you would read this too, but you? You are not doing this.
How can this be, your creative self says. Your spirit is moving, you are going with the flow, the knitting is happening inside your soul. It is so good it clearly cannot be wrong.
The logical side of you pipes up once in a while and says, yes but these holes are not in the right place. The creative self doesn't even register the objection. The creative self is a mite stubborn, mulish even.
I'm midway through the lily of the valley section, on to charts 3 c and d, and only have two rows to go. I will be reknitting a couple of rows yet again, before I move on to chart 4.
Such is the way of lace. If this were a normal project, this is where it would get tossed into a corner. But marathon knitting is just like marathon running. You might hit the wall where your body just doesn't want to go anymore, but if you stick with it, and move deliberately through it, you will get to the finish line.
Same thing with knitting. Stick with it, and you will get there.
Ah, but couldn't you call it a variation? Making the pattern your own? You see how I get around my mistakes! It's beautiful - and remember to breathe.
ReplyDeleteSue
Aargh is putting it mildly. I am making a shawl for a friend's wedding, from the Victorian Lace Book. The yarn she chose is a kid mohair and silk yarn, like a wisp of air and a little hair. It's absolutely heavenly. But I've started again and again five times. Just as you said--there's that dec in the wrong place. Count the row below. Count the row that I'm on, OK. so where is the problem? I put it away till I get back home. And I am a really, really experienced knitter--I can iperceptively fudge errors--but not this time. And this shawl is soo special.
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