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!

I left a comment about how thrilled I was that there were a bunch of other knitting authors out there and they actually invited me to join them! Poor things don’t know what they’re in for, right? Shhhhh – don’t tell them yet!

I put my first knitting blog post up today on my current WIP – stop by and visit me if you want to see. And bookmark the blog so you can come back if you’re a fellow knitting – addictions are always better in a group!

My current favorite (it changes on occasion) is knitting and I’m just tackling my first pair of socks. I’m not sure how many others out there that read my blog are knitters but be warned that I’ll probably bore the others on occasion with updates on the knitting front.

Right now I’m fascinated by socks. I ordered a Sock Knit Along from Knit Picks to play with but I had some needles and yarn from a prior order so I started a pair of socks.

These are in Knit Picks Felici yarn, Patina colorway. I’m knitting them on 2.5mm double-pointed needles and working toe-down. The pattern is more of a recipe from the book More Sensational Knitted Socks by Charlene Schurch. It’s a four-stitch pattern called Embossed Stitch. This is sock #1 and I’ve been working on it, off and on, for two days.

I’ll get some pictures in the next day or so to show you all. Then you can run screaming away!