Yay! I finished the center flower of the lace shawl...the part that kept kickin' my butt. I just couldn't seem to get a handle on the "big picture." I put a lifeline at one point, and got within 2 rounds of finishing the medallion, and discovered a problem just after my lifeline, so I ripped back about 10 rounds....and picked up the lifeline stitches, and still couldn't make it work. Turned out that there was a mistake BEFORE the lifeline, so I had to go back a few extra rows. Stitch by stitch. More fun than I can express, since at this point each round is 240 stitches....
But we're past that now. I finished the center, double checked it, put in a new lifeline and laid it out for a picture. TaDa!!
Now I'm on the feather and fan part of the pattern. (Huge sigh of relief) There is a sense of "pattern." It's semi-memorizable. And after each pattern row is 3 rows of stockinette!!! YAY!!
I'm hosting a baby shower for my niece next Sunday, but will be out of town on Fri/Sat, so I spent the weekend doing everything I could think of ahead. All of the bugs that crawl across my carpet and die at the baseboards have been swept up, which is a step. However, as usual, as soon as I put the sweeper away, I noticed a bug crawling across the carpet. I tried to warn it - "No, no! Stay away from the baseboards! They're a death-trap!" but it didn't seem to be deterred. Oh well. I tried!
Keep knitting!
Cynthia (aka Designated Knitter)
It looks great so far!! Definitely worth the effort! (So relieved you are at part which is more straight forward now, however :-)
ReplyDeleteGood luck with the bugs!
You will have one beautiful shawl there! I've been knitting for about a year so I'm still pretty inexperienced. What is a lifeline? I get the idea, but how do you so it? I'm intrigued!
ReplyDeleteMarie:
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment!
As I'm sure you've figured out, a lifeline is a piece of yarn threaded through the live stitches on the needle, so that if you later need to "frog" (rip-it) you have a place where you can pick the stitches up again, and be sure you haven't dropped any stitches. Provided of course, that the row with the lifeline is correct to begin with. That was one of my problems - I didn't do a good enough job of verifying that!
As for HOW you do it, I thread yarn onto a darning needle and thread it through the stitches while they are on the needle. Usually I use a smaller yarn than I'm knitting with, but since this is lace weight, I actually went up to a fingering weight.
In this project, I've found threading the lifeline to be rather tedious, which is why I haven't used as many as I really should.
Does anyone have anything to add about lifelines???
Thanks again for you comment! (I enjoy your blog as well - I've been lurking!)
Thank you for the lifeline tutorial! A very useful piece of information to have for a lace sweater I plan to make for myself some time later this year.
ReplyDeleteMy current project, a sweater for my husband, seems to be a simple pattern.
When I have made things in the past and had to rip back, the worst part is making sure I pick up the stitches again without twisting any. Thanks for reading Homestead Lutheran Acad. I want to get more knitting on there again, but this sweater grows slowly.