Round the Bend

Positively whizzing round the edge of this shawl - attaching the border as I go. I've gone round the bend.

I need to get a move on - due to various complications the baby will be born on Tuesday. That's right, this next Tuesday coming. Bit of a change from the end of March, which was my original deadline.

Anyway, the border is not difficult. There is a ten row pattern repeat, garter stitch based, varying in stitch count between 20 and 24 stitches. The border is attached to the live stitches of the shawl, every second (private side) row with K2tog (or in my case SSK - I think it gives a neater join). Coming up to the corner, I realised that I had too few stitches to make the pattern fit neatly and so I had to do knitter's fudge. I was only two stitches adrift, anyway, so it was pretty easy to attach two border stitches to the one live edge stitch a couple of times.

This meant that I was at the beginning of a 10 row pattern repeat when I hit the corner stitch (which I had thoughtfully marked with a length of the famous red crochet cotton). Pattern tells us to work the next pattern repeat but attach only rows 2 and 10 to the same corner stitch, slipping the last stitch on the private side rows between.

I did that and it looked dreadful. I'm sorry to say I didn't take a picture - it was dead of night and the lights in here just aren't up to it. Suffice to say that there was a gaping hole at the corner and I was not satisfied with it.

I ripped it back. (I didn't rip it - I tinked, stitch by painful stitch). I knitted the same pattern repeat again, but this time I attached the last stitch of each private side row to that same corner stitch. It looks a lot better:



It's not perfect, but it is not yet blocked and, as any self-respecting lace knitter knows, the blocking covers a multitude of sins. I am keeping my fingers crossed on that one.

Moral of the story is - don't just follow the pattern blindly, think!

One corner down, three to go. Am I up to the challenge?