I learned a valuable lesson when working in 3-D:  never take the knitting needle out of live stitches by accident, especially when working a lace pattern.

I bought some lovely yarn on one of my trips and, since we just moved, I can’t find the ball band to tell you about it.  But suffice it to say that it worked up into a lovely narrow scarf for use with a work outfit or something.  Just as I was trying to figure out how to cast off, I pulled out what I thought was the non-working needle and voila.

It was the working needle.

For those of you who don’t know what I mean, in knitting, you have live stitches on a needle.  If you have experience, you can generally put them back on a needle.  It takes practice.  I can do it, if I’m careful, with stockinette stitch – so-called “plain” knitting.  I can do it with rib stitches and garter stitches too.  But lace?  Not so much.

Sadly, I fiddled and faddled and put the project away sometime last year or early this year.

In moving, I found it again and decided to bite the bullet and start over.  Yesterday, I sat down with my trusty ball winder and took the scarf apart.  I’m going to make it over again with a pattern from Barbara Walker’s A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns, called “Rick Rib.”  It’s a combination of rib stitch and lace.  It’s very simple to work, just two lines, and can be made on any even number of stitches.  I’ve cast on twenty and started.  Here’s how it looks so far (there’s not much yet, but from tiny acorns…)

Here is the project with the yarn next to it.  The jumbled bits are because I did about six rows and realized I’d made several errors and had the wrong stitch count.  Some knitting days are like that.  I started over this morning and it’s going more smoothly.

I love the way the knitted cast on looks like a series of sideways knit stitches.  I’ll post more pictures once I have the pattern established so you can get a look at it.