I'm still here! Sorry for the dearth of posts in the last week. Life here has been crazy! Also challenging and fun -- but above all crazy.
Are you familiar with a knitting practice known as putting in a lifeline? The lifeline is a safety net -- a strand of yarn or thread you run through a row of completed stitches, so that if trouble ensues, you can go back to that point and start over. If you make a mistake in the rows after your lifeline, you just unravel back to the lifeline, rather than taking apart the whole project (ack!).
A lifeline comes in especially handy when you're doing complex stitch patterns in which it's hard to fix mistakes, such as the daisy stitch I'm currently working on for the Moss and Ferns shawl:
I have really learned the value of a lifeline in this project -- it's hard to see in the picture, but there is a strand of sky blue embroidery floss running through the top row of gray, waiting to rescue me and get me back on track if the pattern goes astray.
It's hard to write about lifelines without getting a bit philosophoical. There is something incredibly reassuring about knowing that if you slip up, you can go back to where you started and the project will go on.
Thanks for sticking with me, readers. I so enjoy having this blog to come back to week after week. Recently, I have been making progress in fits and starts, finding time to knit for at least a few minutes a day in the in-between spaces. As always, it's a way of centering myself and making progress that I can see and put my hands on. And while it might be taking me longer than I would like, the project is shaping up.
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