What a difference a day makes . . .

So I have been working on a monster lace pattern scarf. I found the pattern on Ravelry -- the Mason-Dixon blog site, actually, which is in itself a hoot, but that's another story.

Anyway, I started the scarf with a skein of Fundy Footsie sock yarn, and hated it, so away it went to frog-land. I started over, and added a skein of Tapping Tootsie sock yarn, and still hated it, but I hated it less. So away I went frogging . . . and added a skein of Paton's Silk Bamboo in a nice ivory color. At last, I didn't hate the colors, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out WHY the pattern stitch didn't look like the picture of the wonderful lace scarf shown on the blog.

But I am nothing if not willing to persevere for the cause of knitting. So I've been working on this monster scarf (3 strands held together, size 11 needles) for some time now. And still not really liking it, but not really hating it.

This morning, I hauled it out and started working on it again, and by accident did something different (although not quite right) with my yarn overs, and lo, and behold, the lace pattern suddenly worked. So I played around with it some more, and sometimes the pattern worked, and sometimes it did not. I thought I'd finally found the rhyme and reason to it, so I took it to work thinking I'd work on it a little bit if I had some slack time.

Slack time came and I had a novel thought. . . why not see if somewhere on the vast internet I could find a tutorial on the "correct" way to do a yarn over? Hmmm . . . what a concept. So, I did. And, again, lo and behind, I've not been doing the very simple yarn over correctly in the many years I've been knitting. (Can you say self-taught?) Now, knowledge may be power but in this case, it proved dangerous. The pattern that didn't look like the picture looked okay . . . the correct pattern looked pretty darn good, but didn't match the first half of the scarf.

Two choices . . . frog it all and start over. (And as I was thinking about, and thinking about my love-hate feelings about this scarf, I decided I'd rather eat my fingers than do that.) Or, frog back to the point where I stumbled on the "right way to do it", bind off, and make a half-scarf. That felt like a really good thing to do, so I did it. And proceeded to give the half-scarf to a colleague who's small enough to be able to use it and enjoy it! Voila! She's warm and happy, I'm rid of the "happy accident" . . . and I learned how to do a yarn over which will make this year's goal of knitting lace so much more rewarding.

Needless to say, I started over with the scarf. Of course, I'm now almost out of bamboo with enough sock yarn left to finish the scarf -- as cast on -- and make it long enough to work for my much taller self. And, not incidentally, this also solves the problem I'm having with the pashmina scarf I've tried three times to knit. I dread frogging that one again . . . the madelinetosh pashmina yarn HATES being frogged. Oh, well . . .