Nupp paranoia

By | November 7, 2011

Astute readers of last Tuesday’s post might have noticed a thin green line running through my WIP:

see it?

That’s a lifeline, a bit of waste yarn run through every stitch on a single row. If I make a disastrous goof, I can unravel back to that row, slip the stitches from the waste yarn back to my needles, and start over. It’s the knitterly equivalent of hitting the “Save” button every 5 minutes when typing in a long document: if something goes wrong, you’ve only lost at most 5 minutes’ work.

I don’t often use lifelines. Part of it is laziness – who wants to bother installing lifelines? Who wants to interrupt their knitting fun for that kind of tedium? And part of it is hubris – hey, I know how to fix mistakes without ripping back, right? And even if I did need to rip back, I know I could do it, even without a lifeline – I might not like it, but I could do it.

But for this project… well, so far I’ve opted for the added peace of mind that lifelines offer. Each time I complete a 32-row repeat, I check my stitches, then I pull out the old lifeline and re-insert it through all the stitches of the current row. On the next row, I ignore the lifeline as best as possible.

easiest if you slide the tapestry needle along the slender portion of a circular needle

Why? A bit of nupp paranoia, I think. Don’t get me wrong: as I said before, unlike some knitters I don’t mind working nupps. But early on in this project, on a couple nupps I missed a loop or two when working p5tog. It wasn’t until a row or two later that I noticed the loose loop of yarn dangling in the breeze. Given the way nupps are constructed, nothing would’ve unraveled – it wasn’t like I’d dropped a stitch – but that excess yarn would’ve eventually wiggled its way around, creating an unattractive looseness in the nupp and its surrounding stitches. So I dropped back the offending stitches and reknit them – a somewhat fiddly affair, as you can imagine.

Hence the lifeline. With more nupping practice under my belt, and close attention to my p5togs, I haven’t had any dangling loops for a while… but I’m not taking my chances. If I discover a malformed nupp several rows down, I want the option of ripping back to a lifeline. It all boils down to choosing your poison: the tedium of installing lifelines, or the fiddliness of repairing nupps?

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