With the knitting of my lucille cardigan I have been living in fear of making a mistake on the lace patterning. It's not that it is ridiculously complicated, or that I don't know how to correct myself when I go wrong (a skill I have only honed in the last year or so!) but it's just that the wool is pretty thin (4 ply), the needles likewise (2.75mm) and there are 281 stitches in the row. With a pattern that is essentially a repeat of about 6 stitches, it is not an utterly absurd thought that I might miss one stitch, and, then.... a lot of correcting will be needed.
Last night the dreaded occurred and after finishing a row and looking at the emerging pattern, I discovered that I had gone wrong about a quarter of the way along the previous row. Ugh. After undoing a portion of the previous row (which in itself is quite a laborious job given the amount of fiddly knitting involved!) I reached the rough area from where the problem had originated, and a good 30-45 minutes of trial and error correcting followed. I think I managed to sort it all out though, and so I am quite buoyed by the whole experience, as I was thinking that I would have to resort to undoing reams in order to correct any mistakes I'd made (and part of me wondered if I could really do it at all!). Now that I'm about 8 rows into the lace work, the pattern is starting to emerge quite nicely...
Yesterday a lovely friend gave me a home grown hyacinth. It's a fabulous pink colour and adds cheer to the more grey of the January days.
Also adding cheer to most days is Elyseé (my cheeky, incredibly talkative, energetic and mischievous 22 month-old little boy). He was entertaining himself for a long time in the garden this morning with our playful cat, Stencil.
Enjoy your weekend.
