I may not have mentioned this lately, but I've been knitting away like a good little knitter on my lace shawl. I've put it down for short breaks here and there, but overall I've been slowly plugging away and showing remarkable commitment to finishing. I was using my lifeline faithfully, moving it up every time I completed a pattern repeat, and it was all smooth sailing.

No matter how much I knit though, the ball of yarn never got any smaller. It was like the loaves of bread and the fish and the wine - it never ran out. My plan was to knit the shawl till I was out of yarn, so you can see that after a while, the never-ending yarn thing began to get old.

And then I started to get so good at the lace knitting, I started to feel the lace repeats so intuitively, that I didn't even need the lifeline any more. I never made mistakes in the pattern, and if I did, I detected them almost immediately and almost always knew how to fix them. Let's just say I was feeling pret-ty good about my lace progress. I sure didn't need that lifeline anymore, I can tell you that.

Lifelines? Ha. Kid stuff.

Until I noticed that my endless ball of yarn was suddenly the diameter of a quarter, and I didn't have enough yarn left to finish the current pattern repeat, much less the border.

Curses! I can't believe I have to unknit this thing when I am so close to being done, and it was all going so well.

What did I do to deserve this??