Saturday, June 4, 2011

I will conquer this, I hope

I think I've met my knitting match.  I'm working on Jared Flood's Rock Island and it is driving me bananas.    I always find that Flood's patterns are not mindless knits overall (although some have mindless portions which I hope to get to in Rock Island if I ever overcome my current challenges).  But this one has got me.  The lace border was a bit tedious but generally ok.  I did find that I had to back up a couple of times because I did something wrong in an 8 row repeat but there weren't that many stitches in a row so despite the aggravation of taking a few steps back, not a big deal.

Then came a few rows with a bunch of straight garter stitch.  A lovely intermission.

Now, I'm working on the next lace section.  I've frogged back to the knit rows twice now because I keep messing something up.  I read a comment on Ravelry that mindful knitting was necessary to complete this shawl and I think that is where my troubles are.  I'm a pretty good knitter.  I usually love charts.  I like cables and fair isle.  But my mind does tend to wander.  Since there are 271 stitches in the first row, I think this pattern is testing the limits of my attention span.  So yesterday, I started row 1 again, but this time, I wrote the instructions out on a piece of paper.  So far, half way through row 2, I'm where I should be.  Lets hope this continues because I really love this shawl.  And I will conquer it!

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