Partial Frogging

In my post about Road Block(ing), I wrote about my Rocky Mountain Aspens shawl, and how I really didn’t like the final product, at least not as a whole. I did love the lace, and I worked really hard not only to knit it but to get it looking finished by brunch. What I didn’t like was the really thin body shape and the tendency of the top edge to curl, which made the body look even shallower. So what could fix this?

Well, in the short row body, the design called for knitting more stitches past the gap (or after the decrease) than I’m used to. Fewer stitches knit past the gap would give me a deeper shawl, but too few would eat more yarn than I had, so I would be playing a little yarn chicken. I also decided to take out the increases in the top selvedge and switch out the couple of rows of reverse stockinette for a couple of rows of garter, both of which should help with the curling.

To do any of this, I had to back up my finished project to the row before I started the short rows.

This was nice, smooth yarn, and the project was more than 300 stitches across, so the least scary way to go about partially frogging this shawl was to use the needle as a “life line:”

I used the tip to pick up the right “leg” of each knit stitch in the row above my lace. No worries if you don’t pick up the correct side, though. The worst thing that will happen there is your stitch will be twisted, and you can easily untwist it when you knit back that way. It’s more important to make sure each stitch in the row makes it on your needle.

Once that was done, I double checked I didn’t miss any stitches, and I started the frogging:

Unweaving my end was the hardest part of this whole process. Everything after that (even the bind off) came out very easy, so I’m really glad I put my needle in first.

Once the frogging was complete, I used my lace repeats to determine where my short rows should start and got right back to knitting. I’m much happier with the finished result:

Not too shabby, huh? You’ll see that top edge still wants to curl, but it not near as bad as it did in its previous life. So the next time you don’t like your finished project, think about it over brunch like I did. You might be able to salvage it!