I had an... interesting night last night. It was something like a battle of wills between me and the Lily-of-the Valley Smoke ring.
I thought it was time to be finished. I'm dead sick of skinny yarn and little needles. I've been itching to get at my size 9's and some Ultra Alpaca. The smoke ring almost thwarted me. But I kicked its butt.
I got to the end of the last lace pattern repeat and realized I had enough yarn for maybe six more rounds. I had twelve to go. I really have noone but myself to blame for this. I tend to knit with a very loose tension anyway, and with all the bobbles in the lace pattern I was knitting even looser (I don't think that's really a word) than usual. And the pattern does warn that if your tension is remarkably different from the gauge given, you might need more yarn. Unfortunately it didn't occur to me to check my gauge. It's lace, I never check gauge with lace.
I pretended that maybe (just maybe) I would be able to eke out the last twelve rounds if I knit tighter than I had been (even though it requires adding half again the number of stitches). So I knit four rounds into the edging before I gave up.
I am too much of a wuss to just pull out the needles and frog away, so I spent about four hours tinking back through the four rounds of edging and the last pattern repeat. I could have smacked myself for not putting a lifeline in before the last pattern repeat the way I had been planning to, because even that far back, I saw this coming. I did however find that I could tink back four rounds at a time. All you do is pick up the stitch a few rows back instead of just on the previous row. Though this does mean that you are working with up to four strands of yarn that are getting progressively longer, but that you can't wind into a ball because they are still attached to the knitting. I came dangerously close to just having a huge pile of yarn vomit, but it worked out in the end.
I had lost hope that I would finish last night. I had been planning to go to sleep at a reasonable hour because I have been so sleep deprived, and it was near 11:00. But I thought, "Why don't I just get started on the edging? I can finish tomorrow if I have to." So I popped in another movie (my fourth of the day) and got to it.
I was done casting off around 1:30AM. I was so pissed with the freakin' thing that I couldn't stand the thought of not being able to start the Second Green Sweater right away that I just kept going.
The really depressing thing is, I don't particularly like the finished object. I like the yarn, the lace pattern, it looks pretty on the dummy head on the pattern, but I'm just not feeling the love for this thing right now. Maybe it will look better if I re-do the bind off so it isn't quite so loose and I block it.
But I was so grouchy about the freakin' thing that I cast on a gauge swatch for my sweater. And stayed up 'till 2:30.
