I agree with Moxie-from-KR: use a lifeline. Just thread up a tapestry needle with something skinny, strong & contrasting, and run it through all of the loops on your needles after you complete the last row of each repeat. You’ll end up with interesting accents at regular intervals, causing nonknitters everywhere to ask you where you found that cool yarn, or how you make that stitch do that, or if you’re keeping that in when you’re done. You’ll also have the rewarding sense of resisiting homicidal urges several times over (almost equalling going to Sunday school on a really nice day). And when you do need to frog, it will be easy-peasy. You can rip out the offense and start over afresh at the beginnning of a repeat.

“Why is she such a Lifeline apostle?” you ask. Well, too inexperienced to know what she was getting into at the start, she finished a stole of her own design three weeks ago. A stole in an English lace pattern called Drooping Elm Leaf lifted from a “resource” book at an LYS (with the complicit aid of The Best LYS Salesgirl Ever, who flew the coop the next week, dammit – the loss still stings), of Blue Sky Alpaca, sport weight, in an alluring burgundy-brownish shade, measuring twenty inches wide and six feet long, blocked. It was seven repeats wide and thirty-two repeats long, with pattern on every row: plenty of room for error, although frogging was only necessary twice (lots of tinking, though). It was made under a strict deadline of fifteen days, meaning forty rows, or four solid incommutable hours, of knitting per day, before breakfast, on the subway, on breaks at work, and before bed, with one built-in-slacker-day. And then she gave it away.

Ooh. Sorry about the rant. –The lesson learned is this: if you take the time to add lifelines during lace knitting you will almost never need them, but you will be more grateful for the one(s) that you do use than Any Other Thing In Your Knitting Life.

Good luck with Branching Out.

I was going to mention the lifeline thing, but seeing as I’ve never used one myself and prefer the UTTER TORTURE of unknitting stuff like that…Ouch. My sympathies.

It’s beautiful so far, though. Keep it far, far away from Dot…

Good luck, from a former Somerville/Arlington girl (lived there for fifteen years before I went expat…)

We just saw HG2G on Sunday too and had a great time! If only we lived in a universe where men vomited Noro! Drunks would be so much more fun.

Moxie from KR (but also your neighbor I think… writing from Porter Square)