I’ve finished knitting the Faux Russian Stole!  I would have been done a week earlier if I had gone with my gut instinct to stop after 4.5 repeats instead of doing the full 5.5 repeats.  But I didn’t listen to the little voice in my head and continued on to row 82.  After really measure the thing and stretching it out, even at 4.75+ repeats, it was very long.  So I had to rip back to row 46. I knitted an extra 36 rows -- ouch!  Note the innocent ball of Baby Ull turned into an unwieldy yarn monster after all the frogging.  That’s a lot of yarn in the frog pond.

 

 

While I had lifelines after every right/left border repeat, I didn’t have one exactly where I needed it: after row 46.  So I ripped back to row 54, the nearest lifeline.  Since my dental floss lifelines were not very strong, I inserted a US#000 needle at that point.

 

 

Of course, I left in the dental floss just in case.  Good thing, since a review of my work showed a dropped stitch.  See where the dental floss dips down?

 

 

I fixed the dropped stitch, pulled out the lifeline and proceeded to knit the remaining 8 rows and then the top border.  It was easy going until the final step: garter stitch grafting.  Who the #@$?* invented such a thing?  

 

Things were a bit easier after I switched to DPN.  I resisted since I noticed that my Crystal Palace bamboo DPN in US#6 (4.25mm) was NOT the same size as my Addi Turbo US#6 (4.00mm).  But using circs to do grafting was not working, so I took the risk.  After 3 tries, I was finally able to finish grafting the lousy 8 stitches.  No wonder I make all my socks toe up!  Grafting is not very fun for me.

 

Here’s the finished piece, pre-blocking.  Given the cloudy skies, the best way to photograph it was to hang it on my shower rod.  Sorry I couldn’t get the whole thing but my bathroom is the size of a shoebox and I couldn’t fit it all in the picture.

 

 

 

 

P.S. Yes, I didn’t finish this in time for Mother’s Day. ::hangs head in shame::  But I blame work.  Someone’s gotta pay the bills.