This is the lovely Vortex Shawl – though I’m not knitting it in this colorway. Instead I’m knitting it in Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in a colorway called Mineshaft.
Last night I stopped to admire my marvelous progress on the shawl and discovered, to my horror, an unintentional make one (added stitch) about 8 rows back. I just stared at it for a bit and briefly debated leaving it but knew it would make me nuts if I did. I recently figured out how to fix dropped stitches with a crochet hook so I thought I might be able to drop the new stitch and fix it. I gave it a try but once the extra stitch was laddered back, it left a gap at the current row of about a half inch. Not gonna happen. No amount of scrunching or easing made it any better.
I am now in the process of unknitting 8 rows of this shawl. It hurts, really. Unknitting is a tedious process at best and this is a long batch of unknitting. If anyone out there knits, I know you’re wondering why I don’t just rip back but this shawl is done in a spiral and the stitch markers are key. If I ripped back, I wouldn’t know where the stitch markers went.
Just today, as the unknitting continues, I realized this is a lot like the process of re-writing. If something was wrong a ways back, you do sometimes have to just go back to where something went wrong and rewrite. I’m working on some edits for Escape to Me that are akin to this unknitting!















