So I made a mistake a couple of rows back in my lace shawl, noted and set aside for more time until after the midreview last week -- if I try to do delicate repairs while in the middle of a big project I'm likely to get stupid, and making the mistake in the first place was stupid enough (knitting lace in the dark while drinking).
Anyway. The fix. I did some web searching and thinking on the subject, rather than my usual impulsive tear-the-whole-thing-back approach, or even worse, the try-to-fix-blindly approach. My knitting mistakes have largely been about fit in the past, rather than about, um, k1 instead of k2tog, so this called for a different approach. I found this tutorial and decided to go for it.
Here's the lace shawl, pinned out, steamed, and sprayed within an inch of its life with regular-hold spray starch. I forgot how spray starch smells like my grandmother's hair. I'm pretty sure she didn't, you know, actually use the stuff as "product," but is there some kind of old-lady hair spray that smells like that? Weird.
Some additional photos: here's where I, while trying to figure out just what I'd done, managed to drop five or six stitches, including a couple of yarnovers. Nice, huh?. Rather than try to sort it out right away, I picked them up on a pin and pinned them out.
One thing the tutorial doesn't mention is that the pins and the circular needle are both going to need a thorough bath after being coated with starch.
It's still drying; I'll probably let it dry overnight rather than push it and end up with a massive sticky mess. I have plenty of work to do on this stupid section drawing.
Anyway, I have learned my lesson and as soon as I'm back on track here I'll be inserting a lifeline to fall back on should I do this again.
Holy crap! That lifeline idea is great. I'm going to try that when I get into doing cable stuff.
(Still counting the days,btw.)
Yeah, lifelines are really terrific if you're kind of a wreck of a knitter like me. I don't usually use them, although this mistake happened JUST as I was thinking it would be worth stringing one, darnit.
29 days until our final crit.