I picked up my project wrong somehow at knit night last night and dropped about twenty stitches of fine slithery silk off the end and didn’t know it and didn’t see it till I’d made it worse.

I suddenly rued not having filled my new glasses prescription yet. I tried. I stopped things from running any further (it was a fairly complicated lace pattern) and then stuffed the mess back in its ziploc in my knitting bag and hoped that the friend who was showing off her new scarf over there wouldn’t see the angst in my face. Hat project, good thing I’d brought that too, okay, it’s definitely going to be a long slouch hat now (glancing at the clock). Just. Knit. (Deep breath.)

She came over and showed me the pattern she was working from and we laughed together in surprised recognition that the stitch pattern I was making that hat in was the same as for the main part of her shawl. Harmonic convergence. (She helped me right back in that moment and she had no idea.)

It took me till this afternoon to face it. There was no way I was going to tink for two or three hours and the liveliness of the silk was just unfroggable.

I hashed it out. Smoothed out all those snagged separated strands complicating finding where the yarn was supposed to go, worked out what went where, picked up, reknit, nope, re-dropped, tried again… And looked up, done, surprised to see that it had only taken me about twenty minutes. See? All those previous times, they came in handy.

This was a project I had worked so hard to have perfect for publication. Anything less than, I would have had to start all over.

Knitting the next row never felt so good as the pattern continued to settle nicely into place. I knew it was back to being just right but there’s nothing quite like proving it so to myself.

Phew.

(Let’s see if I can sneak another row in before bedtime.)