The doctor is IN

Tonight I didn't go to knitting; I worked late, came home and did laundry. But I had some tricky knitting to do. As I said, the North Sea shawl is much longer... but there was a hole in it. A big, ugly, unintentional dropped stitch kind of hole. About 60 rows back. The bamboo DPN is at the exact location. Obviously there was no way I was going to frog that much of the shawl, so I took heart from Steph's post, took a deep breath, and laddered it down.

This is what it looked like when I started back up the ladder. There were a few problems at the beginning and I had to stop and have an Oreo or three. I used #1 DPNs for the repairs; for simple jobs, a crochet hook works better, but this required a lot of fussing and the DPNs were perfect. Have I mentioned that Shetland wool is a colossal pain to rip back?

Finally, after a couple hours of working on it, swearing, ripping it back again, and having another cookie, I fixed the first few stitches and after that it was smooth sailing. As you can see, I moved it to my desk, which has better light, and put it on top of a white notepad so I could see the stitches better. This helped a lot. There was a tiny bit of fudging the first row or two, but now it's done and it passes the test: I can't remember where the hole was and I can't find it. Hooray! I'm almost halfway through the pattern... let's hope there are no more crises. I'm trying hard not to think about the 96 stitches' worth of grafting that's waiting at the end.