Fixing a Hole in Lace (not that bad, actually!)

First, lovely FINISHED SHAWL photos, woohooo!!




I really like my new shawl pin!
So, I need to get my "F"-is-for-Fix tile. My lovely StellaLuna shawl came through for me - not only did I need to do a splice to fix what would otherwise be an ugly knot right on the edge of the shawl, I also managed to drop some stitches right at the beginning of the shawl (*sigh*), so needed to fix THAT, too.

First, the hole needed to be repaired while everything was still pinned out on the board - it's just easier to re-weave everything in that case. I'd been holding the lost stitches, more or less, with a paperclip since I'd discovered the hole, and blocked the shawl with the paperclip in place:


Then, it was a case of figuring out what that part of the shawl was supposed to look like. Luckily, the answer was "a mirror image of the stuff on the other side of the motif" was the answer. So, I had to "knit" up a stitch, while also knitting up some yarnover stitches, k2tog-ing when appropriate, and otherwise making things more or less match. This is much easier to do with crochet hooks; I've found that oversized crochet hooks actually make it easier to keep track of where things are going - even if they're a bit trickier to get to cooperate with the actual stitching.


Once everything has been reduced to one dropped stitch that has nowhere to hook into, it's time for a wee bit of darning. So, with some extra yarn (always, ALWAYS keep a bit of extra yarn if possible!), I secured one end of the thread by weaving it in to the knitted portion of the motif, then needle-knit the lost stich into the pattern TWICE from the stitch above it. (Sucker's not going ANYWHERE this time.)


Then thoroughly weave in the other end of the extra thread, and trim the ends as closely as possible. Upon really close inspection, there's something a bit squiffy with the repaired motif, but the odds of "really close inspection" are slim, and it looks good enough that it isn't going to draw attention to itself to the detriment of the rest of the shawl by being wonky now. And even better, the WHOLE DANGED SHAWL isn't going to unravel now!


Once the shawl was, for the most part, otherwise okay, I decided that the weaving in had actually gone smoothly and quite invisibly enough that I wasn't going to take the chance of trying to splice the other ends I was going to fix, and that weaving them in would be just fine and not harm the shawl's appearance. And be less likely to cause, oh, something like the WHOLE DANGED SHAWL UNRAVELING.

So that's how I'll get my "Fix" tile! One more (Tidy) to go, and I will have collected them all!