A Little Drama and Queen

Let me begin this post with a disclaimer:  What you are about to witness may be more than you, as a knitter, can handle.  It's ugly. It's really ugly. So, discretion is advised.

I made a mistake.  I have my suspicions that this mistake is the result of a child picking up my knitting from my desk, saying "This is so pretty! Can I have it?" and then promptly dropping 10 stitches and unraveling them for about 6 rows OF LACE. However, it's either a mistake I made in the first place, or a mistake that I made in the second, but it's mine and there it is. Two stitches worked wrongly, five inches down. It hardly looks like any distance at all in the photo.

I posted a pic on Instagram. There was commiseration. On Facebook, my friends agreed that it was "hardly noticeable". Knowing that we were going to be talking MAJOR knitting surgery, I was willing to go with that--for a while--and make the resolution to just leave it alone.

Have I ever told you about how I am a type A personality on speed? For 24 hours, that part of my overachiever, uncompromising brain has been needling me.  Pecking at me. Taunting me.  Reminding me every time I pass this project that I would never wear it without feeling subconscious about that barely noticeable mistake.  All that work would just collect dust on a shelf in the closet. The voice was, actually, right. I wouldn't wear it. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and I caved.  I caved BIG TIME! Heck, I only have to tink back a few stitches for five inches. Cake, right?

I got out the surgical tools.  I hunted down the locking stitch markers and, when I didn't have enough of those, I substituted safety pins. (Not having enough locking stitch markers for this should have been a flashing neon sign that this was going to be a bad idea.)  And then I tinked one section down, a stitch at a time, carefully capturing the innocent stitches with markers, until I got to the offending row.  And it looked like this.

Not so bad, right?  But, allow me to interrupt this tale of woe to say that, at this point in the narrative, once again my life is like the lyrics of the Queen song Rain Must Fall:

You lead a fairy tale existence
But into every life a little rain must fall

Others seem to think
You are over dramatising
Problems at work
So it's hardly surprising
There's little you can do
To alter their opinions
You want a clean reputation
But now you're facing complications
'Cos into every life a little rain must fall

And because my life is like a Queen song, in order to fix this tiny mistake that involved a misplaced yarn over and a misplaced K2tog, I realized that I had to go bigger and just let the complications begin, and suddenly we aren't talking about "a little rain"; we are talking about a typhoon.  

I took out 2 more sections. Because why? Because. It's lace. That's why. There is really no way to just tink down a few stitches, as if you have been doing a S2KP2SO. It's intertwined. It's all friggin' connected. So, if you are faint of heart, you may want to close your eyes and scroll past these next pictures.

And then it was fixed.  My mistake was fixed! The type A side of my brain did a little happy dance and the entire rest of my brain looked at the remaining disaster before me that had to be rebuilt, one stitch at a time, and fainted. Dead away. Fainted. 

Although those two little mistakes were fixed, the amount of re-working to get back five inches of interconnected strands of yarn that make a pattern with carefully aligned holes that it was going to take was quickly becoming exponentially complicated.

Now I'll bet that, like me, you are thinking "Holy crap! This is not going to end well!"  The logical part of my brain was chanting "Frog it! Frog it!" The type A--obviously NOT the logical side--was countering with "There's no going back now. Just focus and fix it." (Leave it to the type A to get level headed now, right?) I am at this point feeling just a bit schizophrenic with all of this back and forth in my brain and the words "I think you broke it"  just sort of slipped out in a whisper.

But then, a miracle happened!  I had re-worked an entire repeat.  And then another. (I know you can't tell so you'll just have to trust me one this one.) Two repeats!

And then I became the Little Engine That Could ("I think I can. I think I can.)  And 1.5 hours later before I knew it, I was one (count it, ONE!) more repeat up.  However, I was still about 3 inches shy of my goal and, with an extremely audible sigh, I resigned myself to just calling it a day and ripping back.  After all, I had CLEARLY forgotten one of the basic tenets of knitting: Pride goeth before the frogging.  So while you are relaxing with your own project, I'll be here, humbly re-working 3 inches of lace, kicking myself for having made such a rookie mistake.