Frogging; and: learning lace
May. 17th, 2015 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
janestarz"Frogging" is the English term for taking your knitting off the needles and unraveling your work. Sometimes a project just doesn't fit right and you'd rather use the yarn for something else, sometimes the pattern needs adjusting.
I find I'm rather perfectionistic, especially when it comes to knitting. I often unweave my knitting to fix an error I made: either horizontally by un-knitting the stitches I just did, or vertically by dropping a stitch because somewhere I did a purl stitch where I needed a knit stitch or vice versa.
By the time I was halfway into Copilot, the cowl I'm knitting, I noticed that some parts of the lace were a little more thickly knitted than others. I couldn't quite see what was going wrong and as I'm pretty new at knitting lace I didn't realise what had gone wrong until I took a closer look:
I drew a little red circle around what was bothering me. As you can see in the hole between the knit stitches, there are bars of thread. Normally, there are just two threads, twisting once around one another in this kind of lace (see top right corner of the picture). In the highlighted part, you can see there are three threads.
But what caused it? I had not one, but two whole rows like this, and it looked like the lace was "thicker" there somehow because there were three threads in the hole, in stead of two.
Only when I looked at the back of the work and examined the rows more closely did I see what had gone wrong. I had knit an extra row!
The pattern for the lace section reads:
Row 1: yarn over, knit-2-together
Row 2: knit all stitches.
The yarn overs create the holes, and in the next row that loop is knit like any other stitch, creating the bar between stitches. But if you knit another row on top of that, slowly new knit stitches appear. And that is probably what I have done: I did row 1, and then I did row 2 twice... I only noticed it because Friday afternoon I did several lace rows out in the sun on the balcony and kept track of where I was properly. It was an error caused by my inexperience with reading the stitches in a lace piece and by stopping my knitting after a row and not keeping track of where I should start again!
I frogged the entire thing back to the rows of garter stitches at the beginning, weighed my yarn again and started on the lace piece anew. Now that I know what I'm looking for, it will not likely happen again, also because I no longer stop at the end of a row, but rather in the middle of one so I can compare the stitches on my left- and right-hand needle to see what I was doing.
Lesson learned.
I can tell myself I am a perfectionist and I shouldn't let this kind of thing get out of control. In this case, I tell myself I frogged back because this is a weighed piece: after each section, you weigh the yarn you have left so you can estimate when to start on which section. Two extra rows of knitting in any one of the sections can screw up your project. If I knit two extra rows in the final parts of the cowl, I'll run out of yarn before it's done!
I find I'm rather perfectionistic, especially when it comes to knitting. I often unweave my knitting to fix an error I made: either horizontally by un-knitting the stitches I just did, or vertically by dropping a stitch because somewhere I did a purl stitch where I needed a knit stitch or vice versa.
By the time I was halfway into Copilot, the cowl I'm knitting, I noticed that some parts of the lace were a little more thickly knitted than others. I couldn't quite see what was going wrong and as I'm pretty new at knitting lace I didn't realise what had gone wrong until I took a closer look:
I drew a little red circle around what was bothering me. As you can see in the hole between the knit stitches, there are bars of thread. Normally, there are just two threads, twisting once around one another in this kind of lace (see top right corner of the picture). In the highlighted part, you can see there are three threads.
But what caused it? I had not one, but two whole rows like this, and it looked like the lace was "thicker" there somehow because there were three threads in the hole, in stead of two.
Only when I looked at the back of the work and examined the rows more closely did I see what had gone wrong. I had knit an extra row!
The pattern for the lace section reads:
Row 1: yarn over, knit-2-together
Row 2: knit all stitches.
The yarn overs create the holes, and in the next row that loop is knit like any other stitch, creating the bar between stitches. But if you knit another row on top of that, slowly new knit stitches appear. And that is probably what I have done: I did row 1, and then I did row 2 twice... I only noticed it because Friday afternoon I did several lace rows out in the sun on the balcony and kept track of where I was properly. It was an error caused by my inexperience with reading the stitches in a lace piece and by stopping my knitting after a row and not keeping track of where I should start again!
I frogged the entire thing back to the rows of garter stitches at the beginning, weighed my yarn again and started on the lace piece anew. Now that I know what I'm looking for, it will not likely happen again, also because I no longer stop at the end of a row, but rather in the middle of one so I can compare the stitches on my left- and right-hand needle to see what I was doing.
Lesson learned.
I can tell myself I am a perfectionist and I shouldn't let this kind of thing get out of control. In this case, I tell myself I frogged back because this is a weighed piece: after each section, you weigh the yarn you have left so you can estimate when to start on which section. Two extra rows of knitting in any one of the sections can screw up your project. If I knit two extra rows in the final parts of the cowl, I'll run out of yarn before it's done!
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Date: 2015-05-17 05:55 pm (UTC)