My Morning Prayers

Sometimes knitting is ugly.

Not ugly looking, but looking ugly.  The product is beautiful.  Maybe.  I hope.  But the work getting there is ugly.

This second shawl that I want to send to Kyiv is my Bridgewater Shawl.  There was a problem on one side of the shawl on the lace border and it has been in a time out for months.  Since December of 2016 according to Ravelry.  Ewwww.  

It's a fairly simple lace pattern and the error is on a series of 8 stitches that were fairly simple to isolate between points within the repeat.  My mantra is I think I can, I think I can.

There is a lot of prayer involved with lace knitting repairs.  It is the down and dirty of knitting.  You have two choices when there is an error from a dropped stitch in lace and it has dropped rows and rows below.  You can pull the whole darn thing back to before the error, or you can tough it out and repair only what needs repair.  In lace, that can sometimes mean a lot of stitches and that is why I call it the ugly of knitting.  

You dropped one stitch.  But that one stitch might affect a whole section of lace, and sometimes two.  And then, if you don't get all of the stitches in the section you need to repair picked back up...double ewwww.  Luckily, this pattern is a nice traditional Shetland pattern.  It has a row of plain knits between pattern rows.  My goal when I try to repair a pattern like this is to always drop and start my repair knitting on that rest row.  That means there are no yarn overs to worry about, no decreases or increases or other stitch manipulation.  The goal is to make sure that I have only plain stitches.    

The thing that makes is all so difficult is that in the time that the stitches have been sitting like this, and even as a function of dropping the stitches below the error to repair it, the yarn of each row involved in the dropping pulls the other stitches oddly out of place.  You end up with way too much yarn in the dropped section and other stitches alongside are pulled into tight little wads of something that looks a lot like trouble.  All you can do is hope that when you have made the repair, that the stitches will sort themselves out and smooth out with the yarn as it  eases back into its proper tension within each of the stitches and that all the stitches that are supposed to be there, are there and the design of the pattern looks exactly as if you had never had a problem.  That is how it is supposed to work.  

A whole lot of prayer in knitting.  Light a candle for me.