When to Rip?

I get a daily newsletter from Interweave Knits.  Most days it is just promoting the pattern archives, new books, their magazines, etc.  Often there are articles on specific patterns in the new magazines or techniques.  Today’s talked about weaving in ends.  An end is what happens when you finish one skein and need to add another.  The end of one and the beginning of another leave “tails” that need to be secured and hidden so that finished item doesn’t have these unsightly pieces of yarn hanging out everywhere.

They also talked about when you should rip something out to fix a mistake.  A quick re-read of a previous blog post on the turquoise dress for H will reveal my mind-boggling mistakes with the cables.  Since I didn’t discover it until I was completely done and fixing it would have required redoing the entire bodice (filled with cables and lace) I decided to screw it and leave it there.  I won’t fix it and you can’t make me.  After all, there are no knitting police.  Read about it here:http://soupygirlknitting.com/?p=143

Nine times out of ten (or more) I’ll rip back to fix a mistake.  (often called frogging… rip it, rip it, rip it).  I have a perverse perfectionist streak that will not allow me to knowingly finish a piece with a mistake in it.  It bothers me.  My eyes instantly go right to the flaw and it sits there whining at me (fix me! how could you leave me like this? don’t you know everyone is going to see how you screwed this up?)  Also, if I wasn’t re-knitting that I’d be knitting something else.  Knitting is knitting after all and who cares whether it’s to fix a mistake or make a whole new project.  The main thing is that if I am spending the money on nice yarn and have gone to all the trouble to find a good pattern why on earth would I not spend the extra time to make sure it looks nice?  If something is a gift there is no question that I’ll rip it out no matter what.  It is simply disrespectful to give somebody a hand made gift that is less than perfect.

The few times I do leave a mistake in situ there are good reasons.  For instance, the KidSilk Haze scarf I made was riddled with mistakes.  But it was a complicated lace pattern and someone would have to look at it pretty closely to find the problems (and really only Sparky and H get that close and neither has any idea of what a missed yarnover looks like).  Not to mention the fact that ripping out mohair is so close to impossible that I would be a quivering, swearing, ball of rage by the time I ripped back to the mistake– and ripped out mohair looks like ass.  The issue is that all that pretty halo of fur that makes mohair look so fuzzy binds to itself as you knit.  It binds completely and irreversibly.  I made this before I began keeping this blog so there is no entry on this project…alas.

What’s funny is that a simple knitting pattern often shows a mistake more readily than a complicated one.  If something is just straight stockinette stitch an errant yarnover, decrease, purl or whatever stands out like a sore thumb.  But with a really busy lace pattern a simple mistake gets lost.  Sometimes a mistake creates bigger problems.  Like when  I forget a yarn over or a decrease.  It throws off the stitch count and everything that comes after will be wrong. This is usually how I discover that there was a problem.

Sometimes there is a problem with the pattern itself.  You frog something, reknit it and wind up in exactly the same situation as before.  So annoying.  I’ve run into this problem more than once.  It takes some creative problem solving and often a big piece of paper.

Then there was the time I ate a giant slice of crazy pie (in my defense I was in my first trimester and my brain had gone to Mexico for a few months, the temp brain the agency sent was just not up to par and she was fired as soon as I hit the second trimester).  While there were one or two actual small problems with the blue lace shrug (again with the mohair!), there were not in fact epically huge problems like I thought.  I went to great lengths to “fix” the pattern to make it work with the stitch count.  In my defense, considering how mushy my brain was it was rather brilliant that I was able to make it all come out in a way that looks right.  Much to my embarrassment, I actually wrote a scathing blog post and wrote the designer.  Ugh.  I’m cringing, but here is that post:  http://soupygirlknitting.com/?p=44

So…. when to frog, when to just get the sucker done?  It’s a fine balance between how bad will it look when it’s done?/how hard is it to go back?/how much will it drive me crazy?  Usually the balance tips towards getting it done correctly.  Every once in a while… let sleeping frogs lie.