MS3 Clue 3 DONE!!

My MS3 is now getting too big for my camera to take a picture of the entire thing. I took a picture of just the center part because if I included all of it I felt there wasn't enough detail. Clue 3 was done last night just before midnight!! WOOHOO!! Just under the wire, but not without mishap in the afternoon.


Knitting happily along and having had some minor mistakes that were pretty easy to fix, I blithely decided (I am sure you can see where this is going!) that I wouldn't move my lifeline. I am such a slow knitter and I check frequently that I am on track and I figured that I wouldn't need it. I now BOW to the knitting God and I will not tempt the knitting mojo with my foolish thoughts!!

I got to the end of row 193 and was one stitch short. What???? I carefully looked back through my knitting and couldn't find anything. What????? I counted stitches - OK only 98, but I still couldn't find the mistake. I tinked back stitch by stitch - carefully I thought - and when I had unknit row 193 I had a look. The stitch marker on the left is a dropped stitch. I quickly put a marker on it and recounted - Uh Oh now 97 stitches - I clearly had dropped this stitch in the tinking part. I carefully then compared my stole to the pattern and low and behold found a missed YO (that is the marker on the right).

While I have picked up dropped stitches in stockinette stitch and in garter stitch, I have never, never picked up something in lace.

Now I was in a panic - I am at row 192, my lifeline is at row 150 and it has taken me literally all week to knit up to this point on the clue. I stopped only once to knit something fun and fast (tessalating fish, previous post), but have basically been monogonous and knit for 2 hours each night just to keep up. My chart is marked off with the required number of rows I need to complete each night so I finish up on Thursday - if I had to rip down to the lifeline I would be an entire week behind with no way to catch up AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!

So.........I cast on with bigger needles and bigger yarn and started knitting a swatch that matched this part of the stole. When I got a little beyond this part, I intentionally dropped a stitch off and watched as it unraveled back to where I was at on my stole. This is the AHA moment - I could now see how the threads worked!!!!! I could fix my dropped stitch!!!! What a break through for me - I can "read" my knitting - Finally!!. I took my trusty tiny crochet hook and rewove the threads for this stitch and when I reached the point where it should be on the needle I just put in the marker to hold until I could get to knitting again.

Here is my missed YO - basically the same approach as above except I didn't need to knit a swatch because I had learned how the threads should look when I fixed the dropped stitch. I just used my teeny tiny crochet hook when I got to this point again and fixed the thing. What a feeling!! I can't even begin to explain it - before this stole, I am not even sure I would have been able to look at a piece of knitting and have been able to "see" where the error was. Now, not only could I see it, I could fix it. I feel like I have now passed from a novice knitter into the next level - I might actually be approaching a median knitter. I can't believe it!!