A Tragedy in Lace

We had a lovely visit with Grandma and Grandpa and sent them back toward home last Friday. In honor of their visit, Beeb continued the cute army crawl but gained considerable speed, sprouted two new teeth on the top, and started pulling himself up to his feet, but only on low objects where he can support the weight of his upper body while getting the feetsies under. We had lots of other fun as well...visits to the Geology Museum, the Physics Museum, the zoo, a hike at a park, the library, and so on. We even made a mass trip (Grandpa, Grandma, Bug, Bean, Beeb, and I) to Knit Night at the Sow's Ear. After showing off my favorite LYS and introducing some of the crazy knitter-folk, Bug and Bean settled down with hot chocolate, markers, tablets, and Grandpa, while Beeb flirted from Grandma's lap and I got a little knitting done. We didn't stay very late, but I was surprised how long we did make it!

Moving on to the minor lace disaster...my Laminaria was percolating along nicely. I had finished the set-up chart, six repeats of the star chart, the transition chart, and was almost through my first repeat of the blossom chart. I had found a few moments of quiet Beebness before the Harlot event and was knitting along merrily when Beeb decided to rear backwards in the sling and ended up giving a yank on the circular cord. About a dozen or so stitches had fallen off the left needle. Between the Beeb wiggles and the adrenaline rush, I just put everything into my bag for later.

When I had a quiet moment and calmer nerves, I worked on picking up the dropped stitches and managed to get them back on, but wound up one stitch short. After a LONG search, I couldn't figure out what had happened so I did an acceptable job fudging to get the stitch count back to where it needed to be. I finished the rest of the (RS) row. I was especially careful purling back on the next row so I could double check that there were enough stitches and yo's in the right places. I made it past the dropped stitches and started to breathe a sigh of relief, when I ran into another spot with mistakes in it. Since everything had been going fine prior to the distracted knitting at the bookstore, I decided to tink back the purl row and the problem knit row. Fine. Great solution, except that the Malabrigo was really grabby tinking back and I managed to drop more stitches. I found all the dropped stitches, picked them up on stitch markers and tinked back another row. After tinking back three or four rows total, I was almost through a row where everything was right, when I managed to snap the yarn. The fuzzies were making thing very tight in stretches and it was almost impossible to move the stitches on the needle at times. *Le sigh*

I would have had to tink back a whole bunch more stitches to get enough yarn loose to splice the yarn. At this point, I put the shawl into a short time out. After some consideration, I finally decided to cut my losses and just start the thing over, since I could fix a couple of things that were minor irritants on the way. I went up one size on the needles, which should help with both knitting and tinking struggles I was having and I modified the second repeat of the charts so the start section would be symmetrical. I am much happier with the symmetry and the larger needle size, so I'm glad that I started over. Of course, with two repeats of the star chart still left, I have had just about enough of the stinkin' stars!

I also had a lovely Mother's Day over the weekend (well, except the part where Bean barfed all over me on Saturday evening and again in the wee hours of Sunday morning). Pretty low key, but enjoyable. Bug wrapped up the Mother's Day card that my parents had sent me and, well, regifted it. It was cute. If he's still doing it in another few years, not so cute anymore! I took my knitting and went to the coffee shop for a bit in the afternoon. I might have stayed longer, but all the little college kids were studying for finals and the stress level was starting to get to me!