Seeing Red

It seems that I've fallen into a summer schedule whether I intended to or not. Please check back regularly for updates which I will post 'as and when' (but at least once a week.) Although summer should be a time of R&R (don't worry, I have penciled in some time for that), mine has turned into an onslaught of Driving and DIY.

Well, my wonderful weekend of knitting really was a weekend of knitting but wasn't so wonderful. I enjoyed a couple of hours on Saturday starting off my Swallowtail Shawl. DD2 on the other hand, spent her time ripping back her first attempt. With increasing frustration, she has declared her Knit Picks Shadow a 'no-go' yarn and thrown the whole project into the corner of her room in disgust.

She'd been doing fine, but then realised that she had too many stitches and when she tried to frog back, the rather delicate, fuzzy yarn got so knotted up that it broke....several times. Patience was not in her vocabulary and, eyeing my small piece of work, she warned me that the going might get tough.

It did.

On Sunday, I went back to my two inches of work only to discover that I too had created way too many stitches on my second lot of 6 rows in the Budding Lace Pattern. Determined to be more patient than my offspring, I frogged back to row 6 and attempted to start again. Two rows in and I again had too many stitches.

I went to Ravelry.

Reading the comments listed for the Swallowtail Shawl written by fellow Ravellers, I found Kim at "Musings Of The Fuzzy Kind". Having sat there doing the math trying to work out how many stitches I should have after each pattern row, I discovered that Kim has already done the job. She has made a PDF called "The Swallowtail Mileage Sheet" which lists the number of stitches for each row for the entire 14 repeats of the Budding Lace Pattern. Invaluable!

Despite trying to frog delicately back, I eventually decided that I'd actually done so little that I might as well just rip out the whole thing and start again. So I did. Late last night I reached the second repeat of the Budding Lace Pattern.....and made the same mistakes over again. In complete and utter frustration, I turned to the chart to see if that would shed more light on the issue than the written instructions. And do you know what? It did!

Just before I went to bed, the penny dropped. From studying the chart, I realised that I'd been repeating the entire section between the stars instead of just the 6-stitch repeat! That was how I was ending up with too many stitches.

Duh! Dunderhead!!

There is now a chance that I will get beyond the first repeat of this lace shawl and who knows, maybe once I do, I'll persuade DD2 to take the journey with me again.