Learning the hard way

Before I started my Branching Out scarf, I read up on the experiences of others who had tried the pattern at the Knitty Coffeeshop. I was going to heed their advice, learn from their mistakes and conquer my first lace project.

Nope. Turns out, I needed to make my own mistakes.

My scarf was going along swimmingly. It was fun to knit and I made it through 13 pattern repeats without incident. It was so trouble free, I neglected to weave in a "lifeline" between my pattern repeats. Lifelines? We don't need no stinking lifelines.

That was dumb. I completely screwed up the 14th repeat.

I tried to tink back a row (tink: verb to un-knit, one stitch at a time. see also: royal pain). Tinking lace is not as simple as tinking garter stitch - the knit three togethers and yarn overs come back to bite you in the butt. I had a tough time getting the right number of stitches back on my needles.

Then I figure out I have screwed up more than one row and I now have an incorrect number of sad, twisted misshapen stitches on my needles. So I decide to just go for it and frog back to where things made sense (frog: verb to recklessly take your stitches off the needles and rip out row upon row of your hard work. origins: someone thought associating this process with the cutesy "rip it ribbit" noise would make this less devastating, they were wrong).

It took me close to a week to gather the courage to do this and close to two hours to get myself back to a logical place in the pattern. I'm back on track now, but have learned my lesson.

See that pretty pink ribbon?

I will not be skipping the lifeline anymore. If I screw up now, I can just pull things back to my pretty pink ribbon and start again with all of the correct stitches in all of the correct places on line 1 of the pattern. So much better than last night's adventure.