Frog Stitching

Remember this project from a couple of weeks ago?  Yeah, I thought I was so smart, I'd finally started knitting something for myself.  This is a fairly simple lace pattern, as far as lace patterns go in knitting.  The yarn is a worsted weight, meaning 8 skinny strands of fiber twisted together into a fairly thick yarn, and I'm working on a size 9 needle.  It was going as fast as 230 stitches in each row can go when you have to count and pay attention to which row you're on.

 

Key words:  Pay Attention.

 

This is the left front.  It looks pretty good at this point.

This is the back.  Also pretty good.

The pattern is February Lady Sweater.  You can find it on Ravelry.com. 

So if you look at the 'back' photo, you can see the line of stitches between where the holes are.  The holes are offset every other row so they move out from that center line. 

That center line SHOULD line up.  All. The. Way. Down. The. Sweater.

They. Didn't!

I had knit several evenings, probably a whole seven or eight, doing maybe another six or seven inches of pattern.  If you look at the first picture, my project is laid on top of the pattern, which is on letter sized paper, 8 1/2 inches by 11 inches.  At that point in time my sweater was about 10 inches from shoulder to where I was working.  So add six inches to that and you can guess how many stitches I had made.  The math makes my head hurt.

I was admiring my work when I saw it.  Actually them.  Five of them... five lines that took detours into LARGE holes and went sideways by a stitch.

One stitch.  I almost cried.  So I sat there thinking, would anyone notice?  Oh God, please let me close my eyes, open them again, and have it not be true.

I asked DH if he could see what I did.  He wouldn't see a thing, I told myself.  He can't find a bottle of catsup in the fridge unless it's on the edge of the shelf promising to fall out.

He said, oh yeah, I see it.  Is that big hole supposed to be there?

Dead before I even started...

This lace pattern goes over 7 stitches and repeats.  I count as I knit, one two three four five six seven.  I should be starting the lace pattern over again after seven, if I have lived right in that moment.

I know how to fix a booboo in knitting.  You can knit over to the place above the error, un-knit or frog stitch just that stitch down to the error, fix it and knit each row back up to the top.  In theory.  You can do a column of stitches or just one.  I've done it on smaller widths, or when the error was closer to the needles.  So I tried pulling out some spare needles and un-knitting those seven stitches that contained the first error, but there were SO many rows knit, I lost track of the pattern about an inch past the error and it just kept getting worse.  And I had this to do in FIVE places!

<<insert groaning sounds here>>

Results:

Frogged back to the beginning of the lace!

Rip it!  Rip it!

I unwound two large balls and put them back in the project bag.  Maybe I can wear this next February!

Knit on...