At about 10 o’clock the other night, while knitting in front of the TV, I threw down my knitting, announcing that it was completely ruined due to a “bloody great hole” in it. I then explained to Steven that I wasn’t sure I could fix it because it was “enormous”, “I haven’t put any lifelines in” and I didn’t think I’d be able to put an afterthought lifeline in “because of the pattern”.
Having left the shawl alone for a day or so, I thought I would take a look this morning to see if I could fix it. The picture above clearly shows the “bloody great hole” and the dropped stitch that caused it.
What do you mean you can’t see a “bloody great hole”? Take a look at this next picture. See that loop sticking up?
That’s a dropped stitch from what must be a whole 3 rows back and has clearly left a “bloody great hole”. Still can’t see it? Let me zoom out and show you the whole shawl.
Well, um, okay, maybe it’s not a “bloody great hole”, maybe it’s just a little bit of a hole and, rather than being “impossible to fix and I’ll have to re-knit the whole bloody thing”, maybe I’ve already fixed it with a crochet hook.
Lesson learned? Don’t panic — at least not until after you’ve had a good night’s sleep and looked at the problem in daylight.
The shawl pattern is my own design, which I will write up and publish eventually, except that I keep changing my mind. I’ve already frogged and re-knitted the first version completely. This was supposed to be a copy of the second version as a present for my mother-in-law but I’m going to do something different with the border, which means that I’ll end up re-knitting a large part of the first one again so that it actually matches the written-down pattern. Here is a close-up photo of the body of the first shawl, which was shown as a sneak peek in an earlier post.
