Frogging, Lifelines, and Lace! Oh boy!

I have learned that when you are working on a lace project, and you have a husband who likes to interrupt your counting (or you get distracted and just lose count), it is inevitable that you will have to frog or tink backwards in your work. Luckily, I learned about lifelines from the very first knitting group that I went to through Meetup.com. If you’ve never heard of a lifeline, watch this quick demonstration showing one way of creating it. Using a Lifeline

I use either a piece of yarn that is a lighter weight than the yarn I’m working with or a piece of unwaxed dental floss. I learned the hard way that thread may break and then you have to start over.

I’m working on the Stepping Stones KAL Summer ’15 and finished Part 2 of the pattern. Here’s a pic of it after I counted to make sure I had 209 stitches and before I added the lifeline. Unfortunately for me, I only added one right here.

I got to the end of the third row in Part 3 of the pattern and realized that I had an additional stitch 😦 I counted over and over…can you feel my pain? I tried to tink (knit spelled backwards) back across the row to find my mistake…alas, I was unable to. I put it down, walked away, and went and made / ate dinner. I came back to it again. I still had one too many stitches.

So, the frogging began. Thank goodness for that lifeline! *Pic was taken late at night, so the full beauty of the yarn is not revealed. These are the live stitches before pulling them out.

I decided to be a little more strategic this time and am placing a lifeline in every row 🙂 It looks like a mess, but better safe than sorry! Do you use lifelines in your knitting?

Happy Knitting!