the road to 'rock island'

Last night I was happily knitting away on my Rock Island shawl, anticipating finishing it within an hour or so, when I started to get the feeling that I was working my way through the stitches on the left side of the center decrease line just a little bit faster than the ones on the right side. Sure enough, when I stopped to count, I had a discrepancy of about five stitches.

If you're unfamiliar with the Rock Island, it's a triangular shawl with a lace edge, a garter stitch bit followed by a lace section, which is then followed by miles of garter stitch back and forth as the triangle forms and the rows grow shorter and shorter.

I held the shawl up to the light and studied the center line all the way down the garter stitch triangle and could not see anything wrong there. I looked carefully along the edges where I was working decreases two stitches in at each edge on every right side row. Nothing wrong there, as far as I could tell. So I ripped back a few rows, recounted and still had the odd extra stitches. Ripping back a few more rows didn't help, so with a sinking heart, I looked really carefully at the very last row of the lace section way on down in my knitting. It was getting a little late and I couldn't tell for sure whether I had made a mistake in that last lace row.

Common sense told me to stop fiddling with it, to leave it until the morning and face it in the clear and uncompromising light of day. This morning, after several cups of strong coffee and sitting by the kitchen window, I started to rip. And I ripped all the way back to the second row of garter stitch. I then picked up the stitches on the needles to carefully work my way back to the last lace row. I have to say that I'm very glad I chose the yarn I did for this project. I had started it in a beautiful Isager alpaca laceweight, but then decided I wanted this shawl to be sturdier and chose a merino fingering yarn from Viola on etsy.

I won't say that I enjoyed ripping out days' worth of knitting, even if it was just garter stitch with a few decreases, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. The yarn is soft, but it has a slightly crisp feel to it and those little stitches, once I'd ripped all the way back and was ready to pick them up with the needle, sat right there like obedient little children just waiting to be told what to do.

Once I'd carefully undone the first row of the garter stitch section and was able to fix the tiny error that caused so much trouble, I triple-checked my stitch counts and secured the ends of the circular needle. I reskeined and washed what felt like miles of yarn, and when it's dry I'll pick up the road to Rock Island once again. I'll just get there a little later than I had planned.

I suppose you could call this a knitting disaster, but with this morning's New York Times right next to me on the kitchen table, full of reports of people all along the east coast who've lost their homes, their businesses and their loved ones as a result of the recent storms, I couldn't really feel sorry for myself. As I drank my coffee this morning, sitting in my own kitchen and anticipating having the morning ahead of me to mess around with my knitting, I felt fortunate.