Lifelines & Frogging

I will post in the next couple of days regarding my sock yarn stash, but have a couple of different knitting topics to cover today.

First of all, I admit that I need to finish some of the socks that I have started.  Yesterday I was going to town with the pair that will be a gift while I sat at gymnastics, and I completed quite a few rows.  Then my coat sleeve caught on one of the double pointed needles (dpns) and pushed it up and out of all of its stitches.  There they sat - fifteen tiny little loops just hoping to be picked up again before they started popping back through the loops on the previous rows.  Trying hard not to panic, I slowly and carefully began slipping the needle back through each itsy-bitsy loop.  The good news is that I got 14 of them back on the needle.  The bad news is that the one I couldn't get had already popped out and started a "run" in the sock.

Not having a tiny crochet hook, I pulled out the too-big plastic one I keep in my knitting bag in a futile attempt to pull the loop back through to where it belonged.  Soon realizing that I needed something smaller, I grabbed my extra dpn to try to use to snag the loop.  (Four dpns hold the knitting and the fifth is used to actually knit across them.)

At least I thought it was my extra needle. 

Turn out that I grabbed one of the other needles that was holding stitches and pulled that one out, leaving another line of 15 loops hanging and vulnerable.  I started to hyperventilate.  Luckily, I managed to get them all back on the needle and refocus my attention back to the dropped stitch.  In the past, I've been able to use a small crochet hook to "reknit" a dropped stitch back up to the current row and pop it back onto the needle.  But for some reason, I just couldn't do it yesterday.  With each attempt, the dropped stitch "ran" further and further down the sock.  I could have cried and if I wasn't in public, I probably would have.  The thought of ripping out the entire sock and starting over made me want to scrap the whole pair.

Taking a deep breath, I decided to try a technique that I have never used before - a lifeline.  A lifeline is a scrap piece of yarn (or even dental floss) that's threaded through the loops of all the stitches on the needles,  often before the start of a difficult part in a pattern.  That way, if you mess up, you can rip out to the yarn/floss which is holding all those loops, replace the needles through them, and start again from that spot.  Note that I had not threaded a lifeline in my sock because it's not a difficult pattern, it's just knitting around and around.  So I took a tapestry needle and some scrap yarn, and attempted to run it through every stitch of a row of knitting a couple of rows below where the "run" ended.  Once I had the lifeline placed, I took a deep breath and pulled out all of the dpns (on purpose this time).  Then I ripped out all of the rows I had just knit plus a few more until the lifeline yarn stopped me.

Hallelujah, I had caught all of the stitches with the lifeline!  I carefully replaced all four of my dpns through the stitches, removed the lifeline yarn, and had 37 seconds to spare before the end of Francesca's gymnastics class.  That was 24 hours ago and I haven't touched that sock since.  There's some bad sock mojo that needs to dissipate first.

Let's talk about "frogging."  I keep hearing this term used in the knitting community - well, reading it actually since it's all over Ravelry.com.  "I frogged my first attempt."  "I forgot the yarn overs so I may frog it and start over."

I gathered that it meant ripping out your knitting, but wasn't quite sure why.  So I asked my best friend, Mr. Google.  The term comes because of the well-known cry of a common frog.

"Rip it.  Rip it."

Yeah, it's pretty freakin' cute.  Not quite so cute when you actually have to do it, though.  I had hoped that yesterday's frogging back to the panic-placed lifeline would be my only experience with this amphibious term for a while.  Ah.... I had a dream....

With three pairs of socks in progress, I promptly cast on a fourth pair in between loads of laundry folding (of which I did six loads today!).  This pair is to participate in a March KAL (knit-a-long - another new acronym I learned recently) on Ravelry.  Everyone knits the same pattern during the month and posts photos, stats, and discussions.  Of those who finish, prizes from yarn-related sponsors are given out via random drawings.  For sock KALs, most of the time the sponsors give hanks of sock yarn, of which I'm addicted.  So I started another pair of two-at-a-time (2AAT) toe-up magic loop socks.

Cast-on  for "Ribbed Ribbon" socks from "Socks from the Toe Up"

Oh boy, oh boy, I was cruising with these socks!  The toes seemed to fly by twice as fast as the "I Heart Toe-Up Socks" ones had.  I started the pattern and got through 8 rows on each sock - I was starting to see the ribbed ribbon pattern!  So exciting!  Yep.  Things were looking goo-ood.

Then a tiny flicker of something in my subconscious made me look back at the toe portion of the pattern where you do a row where you increase the circumference of each sock by four stitches, followed by a row where you just knit without increasing.  Ha ha haaaa.  Yeah.  Seems I forgot the knit-only rows.  No wonder it went by twice as quickly.

So I frogged the whole thing.

In the past 24 hours I have done a lot of knitting and have absolutely nothing to show for it.  I actually think I may be negative a few rows after my dropped stitch debacle at gymnastics.  And now it's time to make dinner and then head out to teach Zumba.  But after that....

Watch out yarn.  I'm coming, and I'll be knittin' ya.