I’ve gone away for the weekend (my host is teaching in the next room, and there are airplanes overhead. A dog who bites post delivery operatives is in the house. The lady of the house is out watching WestLife. No prizes for guessing where I am: I’ve tweeted it, but I thought I’d share some atmos) and brought the two projects that wouldn’t die/grow with me in the hopes that they would grow a bit.

One of them bit back.

Regular readers (ha!) will recall one of these projects is a lilac laceweight scarf.  A few nights ago I had “a session” and completed 4 rows in 2 hours. Or that’s what it seemed like, anyway. This time, during the first row I knitted while on the train (while travelling backwards in a seat with no socket, having requested facing direction of travel with a socket)(my lesson is, only specify the thing you REALLY want (ie direction of travel) and then they can’t fulfil one of the random other things you ask for (window seat) and say “job done”) I realised that a few rows earlier I had gone awry.

This is laceweight. It’s like knitting with hatpins using sewing thread, only fluffier. Wripping back rows at this stage (and then trying to pick up the stitches) is the fast road to insanity. Doing it on an intercity train (did I mention I was travelling backwards? I don’t think I mentioned travelling backwards makes me feel ill) while travelling backwards is the equivalent of a travellator on said road.

I’m not sure that the path I chose to take was any better.

The pattern goes K7, K2tog, YO, K1, YO, SSK, K7, K2tog, etc with shaping variations at the middle & ends which makes each row feel exponentially longer than the previous one. On one of these repeats I’d somehow got my YO mixed up with a K2tog or something, and frankly it was a mess.

You can see in the pic above, the pattern makes for a line of lacy holes. My mistake had caused the line to not be straight any more.

Can I just add here, there would be at-the-time pictures, but on account of the no socket thing, I didn’t have any power in my phone or PC, which I’d allowed to run down on account of the having a socket on the train, only I didn’t, so they were both basically dead at this point. So no scene-of-the-accident pictures, I’m afraid.

Once blocked, this minor error would have become bleedin’ obvious. This will be a gift. Bleedin’ obvious mistakes are not an option.

Wripping back 5 rows was also not an option – since each row takes roughly a year both out of my life and possibly also off the end of it – so instead I took a bold & brave decision. To take 16(ish) stitches back 5 rows, and re-do them.

I isolated that bit of the row on the ends of the needles, from halfway through the K7 on one side, to half way through the K7 on the other side. Then bobbed them off the needles (if you use words like “bobbed” and “popped” it makes it sound much less scary and reckless than “ripped back”. I guess that’s why “tink” is so popular. Sounds quicker, too.) and undid the rows back to before the mistake, then picked up the stitches again. Checking I was starting with the right number of stitches and the right loops, I then knitted back & forth. I had to do the first 3 rows twice, which was a bit disheartening, but in the end I managed to get back to the row I was officially on with the right number of stitches on each side, and an apparently correct, if slightly loopy, section of corrected knitting.

See how the row of holes up the middle is now apparently straight? They weren’t before, trust me. I managed to do one more row before arriving at Euston, which means that this adventure in honing my knitting skills (for I choose to see it as such) took nearly 45 minutes. The knitting looks loopy where the ends of the corrected bit is: this will come out with blocking, of this I am confident. Ish.

An aside: It takes 2 hours from Wigan to Euston on this crazy no-stopping-after-Warrington train – I spent the first hour reading. Then felt sick. I hate to go on about the travelling backwards thing, but they do this to me pretty much every time and it’s quite annoying. Maybe I should just book earlier. So I began knitting, did 15 minutes on my other knitting then remembered that I can talk while doing the other knitting, whereas with this knitting I have to count to 7 repeatedly every other row, in spite of being able to “read” my knitting, so was basically doing the wrong knitting given that I was going to spend the weekend with friends, who will almost certainly want to talk to me. I know, how inconsiderate!

I felt that this incident needed some commemorating, so have highlighted the row on my stitch-counter notes.

You’ll see that I’ve done seven rows since the mistake-correction row. I did six of these on the train between Waterloo & Hounslow, which officially takes about half an hour. Apparently it travels through a time warp.

In other news, one of the books we have from the library at the moment is Dan And Diesel, a book about a boy whose guide dog is stolen but manages to escape & find his way home (because he’s a clever guide dog). I was trying to explain the concept of guide dogs to Lily after we’d read the story, but was struggling. You’d think that with an illustrative children’s story book to hand it would be easy. Apparently not.

I was very excited, then, to meet a lovely guide dog and his owner at Wigan station at the start of my journey.

His name is Spencer, and according to the badge on his harness, he’s a Rotarian.