Nothing like your lace project, which you’re rushing to finish for a special event, giving you a bit of excitement on the weekend. There I was knitting along happily when I realized that I was missing a stitch. *cue suspenseful music*

I was in the 5th of 5 repeates section of the Icarus shawl. Once I had gotten a hang of the pattern several repeats back I had sort of stopped counting the knit stitches between each set of eyelets on a regular basis. For some reason I counted on section near the end of the row only to discover there were 6 stitches instead of 7. I held up the shawl and immediately saw where the problem was… 20 rows back.

I must have been distracted during one of the k2tog, yo, k1, yo, ssk and instead did k2tog, yo, ssk, and continued knitting on my merry way. This caused the rox of eyelets to shift over one stitch, and the missing yo was my missing stitch.

Since there was no way I was ripping back that much knitting, I decided to go for it and drop the stitches. Thankfully, this wasn’t the complicated section of lace. And, I paid close attention when Stephanie posted S.Kate’s pictures.

I put a stitch marker through the stitches just below the problem row, so the stitches wouldn’t go any further than that. I dropped the ssk stitch and its accompanying yo. This is when I actually realized what I had done… ssk the center stitch rather than just skipped a yo. So, the center stitch needed to be dropped as well. As I was dropping the ssk stitch another stitch popped up… this was from the ssk moving over a stitch.

Then, I took a deep breath.

I tried using pins to keep the strands separate, but they ended up just getting in the way. Thankfully, the tencel yarn is smooth so it doesn’t stick to itself and maintained a orderly queue.

I decided the best thing to do was to use a crochet hook to bring back up the straight knitted stitches: the center stitch and the previously missing 7th stitch. This left me with just the ssk and yo to worry about. It was slow going with the double point needles becuase they kept trying to slip out of the 2 stitches. But, I eventually got it back up to the top, and after straightening some of the stitches out, you can’t really tell there was ever a problem.

Whew. After describing all that I don’t think I have the energy to talk about when I found an extra stitch the next night.