When do You Fix It?

Much of the beauty of knitting is in the careful repetition and symmetry of stitches. A project, whether you are working off of a pattern, using a stitch from a dictionary, or are improvising, is usually regular in some way. Even if the person doesn't know the pattern, they may well notice that one part doesn't look the same as the others.

Even worse, because of the repetition, later parts of the pattern rely on there being the right number of stitches. Especially in the round, if you are repeating by 8, and you mess up so that you end up with 55 stitches, it is not going to look right.

Still, many mistakes will be invisible to the average observer. Few people will be staring at your project up close for hours (exception: spinning projects, but it will probably just be you). When do you tink back, frog,  or start over, when do you make a "good enough" fix, and when do you ignore it completely?

I rarely will frog or start over (this explains my vest with the ridiculously large sleeve holes). It is just so frustrating to realize that something is not working out, sometimes you just lie to yourself, and let yourself be lazy. Well, I do at least. Once something is done, I want it to stay done. I don't want to do it a second or third time.

A scarf from 2013 that shouldn't have been finished

But I rarely just let a mistake sit there - except for sizing mistakes, I haven't quite got the hang of that one. There seems to be an extra stitch where there shouldn't be one, but there are no gaping holes in the piece? Just add a decrease as soon as you can and hope you counted right. Find yourself one stitch short? Make one, it probably won't matter. Did an entire repeat of the pattern backwards, offset, or upside-down? Eh, call it a design element and do it that way again after a few repeats.

Heck, the first sweater I ever made (sorry, I don't have a photo) I hadn't knitted in several years. So I wrapped all of my purl stitches backwards and twisted them, and didn't realize that this was wrong until half the sweater was done. Well.... it was just a thicker, warmer sweater than I was planning (and was too small for my brother to wear, so it got donated to charity). It's not a mistake if people don't know the original pattern, it's an original design.

Sometimes, a mistake can just be fixed without too much effort. If you miss a yarn-over in a lace pattern and catch it within a few rows, you can usually, just make one and bring it up, and it will just be a little bit tighter than otherwise - barely noticeable.

But sometimes, you make a mistake in adapting the pattern, and it takes you awhile to notice. Then, you have only two options - start over or change the pattern. In the most recent hat I was making, I cast on 68 stitches. Most of the hat consists of k2 p2 rib, so I figured it didn't matter, as long as it was a repeat of four. Well, it turns out that the decrease for the crown of the hat is an eight stitch repeat. Lesson: always read the whole pattern before starting. But what to do? Just doing the pattern halfway would look odd, because the hat is knit in the round.

Rather than starting over, I wrote a new pattern of decreases. The number of decreases per plain worked stitches was the same, to keep the shape similar, but it was done in a four-stitch repeat, rather than an eight-stitch repeat. It worked out well, and I can't actually tell the difference.

Undyed jacob wool hat for dad

I also misread the pattern for my shawl. I wanted it to be wider that the original pattern called for, so I added additional repeats of the lace pattern - so far, so good. The repeat was 16, so I cast on 160 stitches, and worked it for a full three inches. I wanted squares of a different pattern on the corners, so the first and last repetition were just done in seed stitch. And then, I started to follow the pattern for the edges and my mistake was all too clear - the original pattern had four additional stitches on the edge to keep the piece from curling!

I had seen that there was two stitches of seed stitch on the beginning and end of each row to keep the edges from curling (stockinette will curl, especially when tightly knit; garter and seed stitch will not). What I hadn't noticed was that they were not included in the chart - they were extra.

At this point, I had a choice: start over with four more stitches or adapt the pattern. I couldn't add four more stitches at this point, because it would ruin the rectangular shape of the piece (I think. Maybe it could have worked). Well, of course I chose to just go with it, because I am me, and it has been giving me trouble ever since. Since I can't follow the original pattern, every row I need to figure out what to do with the first few and last few stitches. I have a placeholder to make sure that I don't accidentally add or subtract stitches, but my choices have not been terribly consistent, and the border looks ragged. At least to me.

Ragged, inconsistent edge.

This was supposed to be a rectangular shawl! Maybe it will look better after blocking. Which will be sooner rather than later: the shawl is more than halfway done at this point, assuming I don't decide I need to spin more yarn.

Progress on the shawl as of the beginning of September