Come with me, my love, to the sea, the sea of love.

Most of my knitting attention over the last month and a half has been devoted to one project, the honeybee stole by Anne Hanson. I've had my traveling socks of course and I do have another pair cast on and I also have a complicated sock barely started but mostly, it's been this.

I had several false starts. The needle size was all wrong.

Because the pattern was written for laceweight yarn and I was knitting with a somewhat variable fingering weight, I needed to upsize obviously but it took me a few tries because of my inexperience with lace to determine where exactly I should be in terms of gauge etc. So three different starts until I settled on size 8 needles.

Then there were the mistakes. Thankfully I did not have to rip back to ground zero with any of them but I did have to tink back almost 20 rows once, in the car, while we were on vacation. (the vacation itself may be another post but basically we went to Pigeon Forge TN to see my younger daughter. It was an adventure.)



So things were going well. I had a few scares when I picked up the center stitches to continue from the middle to the other side but after agonizing over it for a few days and much careful laying out and aligning and looking I determined it'd be ok after blocking. Not in a delusional "oh, that giant glaring mistake will block out" way but in a realistic way.

This shawl has three sections. You knit all three sections twice. You start in the middle, do the honeycomb bit, do the swarm bit, do the hive bit, do the edging and cast off, then pick up the middle from your provisional cast-on and repeat.





I was on the last 2 (out of 10) repeats on the last section on the second side when I decided to take the stole to a spin night at a local yarn store for show and tell.

I guess there's really something wrong with my eyes, or the light in my living room, because I had several opportunities to see where the problem was, and I did not see it. Can you see it?



No? How about now?


Now?






That really needs a dramatic "DUN DUN DUN" sound effect.



All I can figure is I did a lot of this knitting during hockey games and I simply did not see it at the time. Plus, we use CFL bulbs and maybe I didn't have quite enough light when I was knitting.



How did it get into the yarn? Well, one of my bobbins had one ply of the pink and orange sock yarn I spun not long ago and I guess I just went ahead and plied that off with the new yarn without noticing at the time. You think I'd at least notice the texture of merino vs border leicester, but no.



So I considered my options, but I knew what was going to happen. Dyeing it might work but I would always know. Ignoring it was not a good idea because, seriously? A big pink stripe? No. I came home from work last night, stuck a long circular needle into the section just below the second swarm section, and frogged it. (there were some knitting errors in the first repeat of the second swarm section that I could have ignored, but I figured in for a penny, in for a pound etc.) I picked up the stitches without further drama and got the offending pink yarn out and got moving on it. I got a repeat done last night while listening to "My Dinner with Andre" which was a movie for which I was definitely not in the mood.

I just didn't want it to suck. And hopefully, now it won't.

It was really embarrasing, though, to pull that out of my knitting bag at the LYS and have everyone going OOH and AAH and then seeing that stripe and the EWW and the UGH (not from them, from me) and the feeling of utter FAIL that happened at that moment.

I hope to start blogging again more but who knows. I'm chairing the Mensa gathering here again and I think I'm going to be pretty busy with that as well as work wearing me out what with this new project I'm on etc. So I can't make any promises.

In the meantime, here's some flowers.