Humbling Life Lines

I am constantly amazed at the thoughts that come to me while working on my knitting. This week I started the swallowtail shawl.
http://www.interweaveknits.com/Galleries/bonus/fall_2006/Swallowtail.asp It is a beautiful shawl, and so many people are enjoying making it. I just happened to have some TREKKING (XXL) sock yarn and thought I would give it a try.

Everything I read about the pattern talked about how easy it is (and it is fairly easy for lace). I read alot of the threads in Ravelry to get an understanding of the best way to proceed and discovered that putting in a life line would be a reasonable safety precaution. (It is lace, afterall.) If you are not familiar with life lines here is a site that explains in detail just how to put one in: http://www.heartstringsfiberarts.com/lifeline.shtm .

So I began early in the week to knit this shawl. Got through the Budding Lace 1 and on to Budding lace 2. This consists of 6 rows that have to be repeated 14 times. I decided to add my life line at the completion of Row 6 each time. As I knit all day Friday and part of the day Saturday, I was thinking this is fairly simple; why, I underst00d it so well that I was catching mistakes as I made them (notice I'm not saying I didn't make any mistakes!) and was able to fix them right away. Hey, who needs a life line?! So last night, Saturday, at about 9:00, my eyes were so tired from working on this small yarn, and I was knitting along on what I had declared to be my last row for the day when the stitch count didn't come out right at the end of the row. Ok, back up. Check every stitch after the stitch markers, since it worked out before the markers. Nope. Too many stitches. Well, another thing I thought I had gotten pretty good at was looking at the pattern formed by the last few rows and being able to spot the mistake. Oh yeah. I spotted it all right, about 4 rows down! (Did I hear someone say "Being humbled by knitting happens all the time"? At least to me it does.)

This afternoon, Sunday, I picked my Swallowtail shawl back up to fix the mistake. Since I had my life line I was able to take it off the needles and rip out all four rows instead of frogging one stitch at a time. What I had at this point was a lot of kinked up, unknitted yarn, just laying in a heap on my table. As I was re-inserting my needles along the life line row, it hit me that this is a lot like life. Just when we get confident in what we are doing or where we are, life throws us a kink. Might be big or could be small. When that happens, dealing with the challenge is so much easier if you have a "life line" to back up to. Then hopefully after the chaos is cleared up, we can pick up and continue to move forward. I'm thankful for life lines; how about you?

...till next time

b