How I performed surgery on a piece to fix a mistake. Crochet + Scissors = Faint.

I see crochet and knit artists alike asking amongst themselves if it is better to leave an error be as if it were fate, or to frog back and fix it, for fear of being forever haunted by its presence. Sometimes you don’t have a choice. One time I was in such a hurry to experiment with a new border that I’d been wanting to try that I literally worked all of the perimeter motifs in a blanket just so I could jump ahead. BUT, I erroneously worked in two extra motifs on one of the sides, causing that side to be wider…

I hacked it apart with scissors, natch.

Here are the gruesome details in an excerpt from the original BabyLove Brand blog post in early 2013.

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Cruising along – Everything is looking fabulous at this point but I started getting a serious itch to see how my squared edge and lace border would come out…

I began to work the outside hexagons all around like working the edge of a jigsaw puzzle before carrying on with the inside. Boy was I proud! I was going to start the border early! I laid out my blanket and snapped the photo below. Then my smile turned to a frown… Two extra hexagons on the newly made side (check them out – I decided to remove the two consecutive hot pink hexes at the top of the pic). Watch how I armed myself with scissors, held my breath (seriously!) and did it!

In the first pic below I am about to cut, but then I realized I wanted to save those two pink hexies. Why waste them? I carefully unraveled them from their neighbors and set them aside to be attached later. Center photo shows the cut border. I dry heaved, but the cut was empowering. Third pic shows what I planned to do during this major surgery. I unraveled every separate row of the cut lace and trimmed all pieces to six inch tails, then I just frogged back the lace a bit and re-crocheted parts of it for a smoother join, weaving in all loose ends (two ends from each cut side on each row of the border).

The surgery was a success! See the finished object below. The leading edge is the newly operated side.

Yum!