Throw out the life line with hand quick and strong:
Why do you tarry, why linger so long?
Haste, then, my brother, no time for delay,
But throw out the life line and save them today.

          Throw out the life line! Throw out the life line!
          Someone is drifting away;
          Throw out the life line! Throw out the life line!
          Someone is sinking today.

 
 

Hey - you ever meet a lace knitter who tells you lifelines are just for sissies and newbies and scaredy-cats… you tell that lace knitter to go sit on an upended #000 DPN, with my compliments, OK?

Show me a lace knitter who scorns lifelines, and I’ll show you an arrogant hubristic fool cruising for a bruising.

Guess what.

For once, that arrogant hubristic fool? Is. Not. Me.

!!!!!!!

Yes! I did the right thing! And I actually reaped the stipulated reward for it.

Either there is some justice in the world after all, or the universe has gone out of its way to lull me into a false (and possibly arrogant and hubristic and foolish) sense of security; because last night I received proof positive that doing the right, the prudent, the proper and intelligent thing… occasionally pays off.

It’s like that old joke (there she goes again, and hey, hasn’t she told this one in this space before?) about the guy who goes to temple week after week and prays, “just let me win the lottery, would that be so much to ask?” and after many such weeks is answered by an exasperated voice from above booming, “Moishe, meet me half-way - buy a ticket!”

Well, I bought the ticket, and damned if I didn’t win the lottery. Or at any rate I learned the nowhere-near-as-hard-as-it-could-have-been way that insurance ain’t necessarily a scam.

You’ve probably guessed by now. Yup. I dropped a stitch. In the last row of the 6th pattern repeat of The Red Blob. And not just any stitch - a domino stitch. The kind that is the culmination of multiple YOs and decreases folded into further decreases; the kind that lets loose a whole cascading snowballing range of havoc.

I think it must have been this stitch right here.

I’m not entirely positive, because by the time I remembered to run for the camera I had already realized that by far the better part of valor was to drop a dozen-plus more stitches and rip this whole section

back to the row above the lifeline - and had done so. When WILL I learn? ALWAYS take a Before picture!!!!

Anyway, even without a Before picture you can probably see why this heart-stopping maneuver made sense. The structure of this lace - what makes it scallop at the edge - works the way it does because the fan (i.e. inverted parasol - remember that for our purposes it’s worked top-down so you’re looking at it upside down when it’s on the needles) section begins wide and becomes progressively narrower, while the space between fans is narrow at first and becomes progressively wider, with alternating shifts in the angle of each group of stitches as each set of increases and decreases is worked. (The principle, actually, is not unlike that of Feather and, ahem, Fan.) The really important point being that this whole section is built from a single central stitch in Row 1, gradually increasing until by Row 14 it comprises 17 stitches. Lose 1/3 of those 17 stitches as I did, and you could spend the whole night breaking your head figuring out which of those twisty bits went where. Release all of them, and you’re rebuilding the whole edifice from the simplest possible foundation. Not only easier, but actually faster because it’s merely a matter of re-knitting in pattern. Much easier and much faster, especially when you know the pattern so well from knitting the five zillion or so preceding fansfansfansfansfans.

And you know the havoc is controlled. It can’t spread laterally into the other, YO-free, sections of the pattern - and it can’t drop more than 14 rows at worst, thanks to that blessed lifeline.

Whew.

(Ironically, BTW, the row in which this occurred, the last row of the repeat, is the one in which I ordinarily run my lifelines - with the infamous Boye needle - and I was half-way across before I realized that for once I had forgotten to do so. The irony, however, is greatly mitigated by the fact that it would have happened anyway, since the stitch I dropped was the one I was about to work - so the new lifeline, had I remembered to place it, wouldn’t have reached that far yet anyway.)

So… bearing in mind that [A] you already know the story has a happy ending; [B] the carnage is nowhere near as bad as it looks; [C] I’ve inadvertently spared you the really harrowing crime-scene shot… here are some pictures of the repair in progress.

Alas for the glory that was Rome

The tricky bit - picking up the strands in the right order

Row 2

Row 4

Row 6

Row 8

Row 10

Row 12

Row 13

Row 14

It will still need a little special care at blocking time - but all stitches are again present and accounted for.

That done, and the row completed, I ran the new lifeline retroactively by slipping all five-hundred-umpteenty stitches to the Boye - and I didn’t grudge a second of the extra time it took.

And then I poured myself a drink. Come on, everybody, raise a glass with me. To lifelines!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Techniques, Lace, Kitri Shawl. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.