The Pain of tinking back 10 million rows of merino laceweight…

A tale of woe, my friends.

Much as I love The River Stole, my brain simply can’t handle the shifting order of the stitches. The way that half the pattern is structured k2tog, yfwd, k1 and the other half is structured yfwd, k2tog, k1 is what makes the flowing lines of the River. But my very tiny brain can’t handle the gear shift halfway through the pattern and so somewhere in the late afternoon of yesterday, knitting to pass the time while my project DVDs burned, I must’ve slipped in a sneaky, additional yfwd.

I tinked back 2 rows only to discover that I’d lost my extra stitch, so proceeded cautiously. (Well, not that cautiously…) for another 14 rows.

I kept holding the stole up to the light, looking at it… wondering hmmm. Does it really show? Will it bother me? I knew it was only a matter of time before the truth hit me. I was going to have to tink back all the way past the original mistake.

I took a deep breath and spent 45 minutes patiently unpicking the knitting. The mohair helpfully caught on itself and threatened to drop and pull stitches loose at every turn, but then it seemed finally that I had salvaged the project. I knit 3 rows from the point where I *thought* I was in the pattern.

But I was somewhere else in the pattern. Who knows how?

More tinking. Yes, that’s right. 3 different episodes of unpicking the stupidly tiny yarn that loves to tangle in itself and drops stitches like they are knickers and this is the free love era. The yarn does not embrace the way of the tink. It is free yarn. It wishes not to be shackled by the chains of knitting. It wishes not to be insulted by the mistakes of a novice knitter. ‘Knit me perfectly first time or feel my wrath,’ it hisses.

Has anyone else been burned by The Pain of tinking? I have read loads of blogs where people mention the notorious horridness of tinking back kidsilk haze but I guess I hadn’t fully appreciated its power to destroy lives until now.

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