Saturday, October 02, 2010

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. (Mark Twain)

I only had 131 stitches left to finish my Renita shawl. Just four rows on the lace chart, and then the ten row final chart. By all rights, I should be bragging right now. Instead, I'm trying to work up the nerve to frog EIGHTEEN repeats of the lace chart. I'm literally in tears at the thought of pulling out over half of the shawl, and then knitting it all over again.

It was about nine repeats ago (about 3/4 of the way through the shawl) that I started to wonder if I would have enough yarn to finish. But I had carefully weighed and marked the halfway point of the skein. The shawl is knit with increases until you've used half of the yarn, and then you decrease for the second half. Adventurous people can simply eyeball their skein, and by guess and pure nerve pick the the halfway point. Since I wasn't willing to take a chance of guessing wrong and not having enough yarn, I actually weighed the yarn and marked the halfway point with a pretty little bow. I'm not sure if my scale isn't accurate enough (it's a food scale that weighs ounces and grams), or if I just plain did it wrong. But I'm 131 stitches off. That's a full week of monogamous knitting completely wasted.

Added to the other blows my pride has taken today, and I'm ready to take up a new hobby.

3 comments:

Paula L said...

oh noez!! can you check rav and see if anyone has any of the same yarn for sale or trade to finish it up!?!

Sandi said...

I went ahead and frogged it, before I could convince myself to try any of the "fix-it" options I was coming up with (nobody will notice if the color changes to a solid green; I could increase the amount of decreases on just the last two inches; I could just end it and keep that side tucked under my arm when I wear it...).

Paula L said...

well, then you can just use that pretty yarn for another pretty project!!

the Renita shawl is super pretty, i'll be it would look great in handspun too =0