Afterthought lifeline

simple shawl with handspun yarn

I'm using up a bunch of odds and ends of handspun yarn to make a shawl.  I've been dyeing much of it as it was various shades of white.  Most of it is a merino/silk blend but there are a couple of skeins of plain merino yarn as well.  I didn't date these bits and pieces but some of the skeins may be over a decade old, just sitting, waiting to be used.   It's the problem when you get 100g or 200g bags of fibre to try.  It's a great sample but what do you do with it afterwards?  It's not enough for much other than mitts or hats.   So I've been saving it and looking through a bin or two, I realised that I had a lot of it.   I'm hoping I have enough to make a reasonably good sized shawl, since I like a more functional garment rather than a decorative one.   It's a simple pattern, with stockinette stitch stripes, with a yarn over pattern between them.  It's slower than the last couple of shawls that I knit that were garter stitch, but easier to keep track of since the front and back are different, and increases are all on the back.    

lifeline added picking up stitches from back

I've knitted almost to the halfway mark, and my fingers are crossed that I don't run out of yarn.  There is a lot of pale green, grey and that peachy pink colour but not so much of the darker greens.   I tried some blue which I thought was the same weight, but turned out to be totally not at all.  I didn't like the way it felt, being so much thicker, so after 3 rows I decided it had to go.  I couldn't imagine frogging each stitch individually since there are already almost 200 stitches per row.  The problem was that I was going to have to rip back to a yarn over row so picking up the stitches from the front was going to be more difficult.   A quick search showed a method of picking up the stitches from the back and for the yarn over row, this was perfect.   It took only a few minutes to take a darning needle threaded with crochet cotton to pick up all the stitches.   I did a quick check, found one missed stitch, but it was only 7 stitches from the end of the row, so I slipped them off the needle and re-picked them up.   I checked again, decided it was good and I will admit that I did hold my breath a bit while I pulled that lifeline out.   Success!  It looks good.

needle threaded through the stitches on lifeline

I'm ready to knit again.   I'm not sure I like that peachy colour, so may need to over-dye it to tone it down a bit.   I don't have enough grey to alternate stripes but the pale green looks like it works as a lighter colour as well.   I'm still wondering how come it turned out so pale, while the other skein with it, was so dark.  Looking at the photos, I'm really glad I got rid of the blue.  I'm also really happy about the technique of picking up a lifeline from the back of the work.  It was so easy.