firecat

I have a Finally Fucking Finished Object (FFFO), a version of Branching Out by Susan Pierce Lawrence on the Knitty web site.

I've had it on the needles since August or so.

I wasn't actively knitting it that whole time, but I had a very difficult time with it and probably knit about twice as many pattern repeats as ended up in my finished scarf. If this is "easy lace" (as billed on Knitty) then I'm not cut out to be a lace knitter.

(I haven't given up on knitted lace yet though.)

It's made out of some mystery yarn on a cone that I got in a Newton's Yarn Country sale. The yarn is soft, light and fluffy. It's not very elastic (and therefore not the smartest yarn to use for a first lace project. Oh well). My swatch was completely unaffected by the washer and dryer so I don't think the scarf is going to be "blockable" per se.

There are still a lot of mistakes—but most of them are relatively invisible, even to me. The one that isn't invisible (but I'm too lazy to fix) is that the first 1/4 of the scarf is "inside out." I noticed quite a while later that I had switched the right side and wrong side rows. It's still probably not noticeable to anyone but another knitter.

Design decisions as a result of mistakes department:

I hopelessly fouled things up around 1/3 of the way into the scarf and "fixed" it by knitting some rows of garter stitch and starting over. So then I knit another chunk of garter stitch 2/3 of the way along.

branching-out_03-04-07
Originally uploaded by firecatstef.

branching-out-full
Originally uploaded by firecatstef.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

submarine-bells.livejournal.com

The thing I've found about lace is that unless one *really* screws things up right royally, the occasional mistake really isn't terribly visible unless one points them out. The "knitting a chunk of garter and starting over" solution to total screwup of the pattern is novel, but it works rather well!

FWIW, I tend to very rarely have total-pattern-screup events since I discovered the joys of stitch markers to indicate pattern repeats or segments. If the beginning and end of each pattern segment is clearly marked, then no matter how much one screws up one segment, it is easy to do the next segment exactly correct (rather than have the error run across the rest of that row). It really makes a huge difference in knitting lace. Do you use stitch markers?

From:

firecat

Yeppers, I know I made at least one mistake or fudged a stitch in most of the pattern repeats but I don't see them.

I do use stitch markers, but I didn't figure out until fairly late in the game how to helpfully position the markers for this pattern. There are no repeats within a single row, and if a mistake is made in one row, that means too many or too few stitches for the next RS row. I finally figured out that I could put a marker on either side of the center stitch. That was a hassle when doing the last two rows, where the center stitch gets incorporated into a decrease and I had to juggle markers. But it helped.

I also got a lot better at tinking the various kinds of decreases, so I was able to tink back to a mistake within a row without dropping stitches all over the place.

And after the big foul-up resulting in the garter stitch rows, I began using a lifeline religiously.