Inadvertant short-row makes hole

Last week when the ladies from church came over to knit I showed them the shawl I was knitting out of Lorna's Laces "Lion & Lamb" yarn. As I spread it out (still on the circular needles) I stopped in horror - there was a hole! I looked closely at the offending gap and realized I must have put the shawl down while working a row, then picked it up again and started working back instead of finishing the row first.


Tammy looked at it and tried to console me by saying, "It's very tiny. No one will ever notice it when you're wearing it - I didn't."

Then Jennifer murmured, "But she'll always know it's there... ."

Jennifer was right. I would always know it was there and it would spoil any enjoyment I might get from wearing it. And if I gave it away - well, I couldn't give it away as a gift knowing that there was a hole in it. A hole I knew about, but didn't fix.

So I assessed the damage. No way to "repair" the hole. It was clearly the result of a mistaken "short row." And I had knit at least six more inches of shawl length beyond the mistake. And this on a shawl in which the number of stitches increases by 8 every other row. Nothing for it but to rip back to the mistake.

I ripped and wound the yarn using my thumb as a nostepinne (Barbara Gentry of Stony Mountain Fibers showed Penny and me how to do this when we took her class on spinning last November). It was almost an entire skein of yarn unknitted to get back to the mistake, I'm sad to say.

Now I'm back to knitting the shawl when I need a break from Dad's Aran, and I'm almost to where I was before I discovered the mistake. And, yes, it was worth the extra work.