Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Double Fuck Up

It's a fact of lace knitting: sometimes you fuck up. And when you do, you have to figure out how to correct your error — whether to pull it out and start over, or adjust and carry on.

But sometimes — rarely, I'll admit — the fuck up can make everything turn out as it should have been, but not as you had planned.

* * *




When you've been knitting as long as I have, you learn there are some things that you absolutely despise doing, so you figure out ways to not have to do it.

I hate sewing together sweaters — so I adapt patterns to knit in the round.

I hate picking up stitches — so I'll do neck and armhole shaping with short rows instead of binding off, which leaves the stitches live.

With the Princess Shawl, the instructions read as follows:

Knit the edging for 85 points. Leave the final stitches on a thread for picking up again later to work the top edging strip. Now, pick up 10 stitches per point (850 stitches) plus 15 extra evenly picked up along the edge = 865 stitches.


Now, one of the reasons I hate picking up stitches is that phrase "evenly" — I'm never entirely confident that I am picking up evenly. The very thought of picking up 865 stitches is so totally mind-bogglingly tedious — the type of thing where, if I had to do it that way, I'd never even start the project. That's even more so when, because of the gauge at which I'm knitting, I have to add 20% to the pattern — doing 13 repeats of the 78 stitch border pattern instead of 11 — which would entail picking up 1,021 stitches.

Sharon Miller points out, in her 2007 update to the pattern, that one can increase the pick-up rate per point, so one doesn't have to knit as many pattern repeats — that by picking up 14 stitches per point, one would only have to knit 62 pattern repeats to arrive at shouting distance of the 865 stitch target. Then again, I have to wonder why the fuck she would originally have instructed a pick-up rate of 10 per point over 85 points, with an extra 15 stitches spread out, when it's much simpler to just knit one more goddamned point, sticking to the 10 stitches per point, and leaving only 5 extra stitches to sprinkle through the pickup.

In any event, there was no fucking way I was going to pick up 865, or 1,021, stitches across 10 feet of lace edging. Instead, I used one of my other tricks: at the inside edge of each odd-numbered pattern row, I cast on an extra stitch, slipping it onto a coiless safety pin. Not only did I avoid picking up stitches after the fact, by using a new pin at the start of each pattern repeat, it also acted as a row counter, keeping track of exactly where I was in the 20 row pattern repeat, and automatically generated a 10 stitch per inch "pick up" rate.



To keep track of exactly how many repeats I had completed, I placed stitch markers on every tenth safety pin — one marker on the tenth pin, two on the twentieth pin, up to the 80th pin. I had figured that with 85 points, I could use a 12 stitch per point pickup rate, then add one to get to the required 1,021 stitches.

It was a long haul knitting the edging — almost two months, what with work, family and gardening interruptions, but, finally, I was at the 84th repeat. And, because knitting lace is an exercise in anality, where one needs to make sure that one's count is correct, I went back and re-counted how many pins worth of stitches I had.

WTF? When I went back and counted, I was fucking 15 repeats off. Sigh… I didn't remember doing it, but I apparently had marked every fifth, instead of every tenth, repeat, at the beginning of the project.

So I took a deep breath, girded my loins, and started knitting again, cursing my middle-aged forgetfulness. Except…

When I got to repeat 84 (again), I remembered I hadn't forgotten that I had marked every fifth, rather than every tenth repeat.

I remembered that I had forgotten that, concerned that I'd run out of coiless safety pins before I could get to the crafts store to buy more, I'd put two repeats — twenty stitches — on some of the early safety pins, and that I had been on repeat 84 when I counted the first time and I now was at repeat number 99 — not 84.

OK — time to recalculate again. I could stop at 99, which would mean 10 stitches per point with 30 extra stitches spread through the edge.

Or I could do the simplest, and most correct, calculation of all — knit another 3 repeats, for a total of 102, and use the pickup rate of 10 stitches per repeat, with only one extra to add in.

So that's how the double-fuck up ended up turning out to be exactly right.

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