Lucky

 The blog may have been quiet lately, but my hands have been busy!

 

In mid-May I started this lovely Estonian piece from Haapsalu Ratt.  In my efforts to use up the stash, I chose a lovely batch of 6 skeins Knit Picks Shadow in Opal Heather.  It can be tricky to estimate yarn amounts with lace sometimes, especially given that it's the one type of knitting where the knitter's preference for look and feel matter more than actual gauge.

 

When I had first ordered the yarn, I had only ordered 4 skeins.  I was fairly sure that I would like it, and 1,760 yards is more than enough for a nice shawl.  When it arrived, though, I realized that I didn't just like it...I LOVED it!  So I ordered two more skeins.

 

Now, I shouldn't have been surprised when the yarn arrived and I discovered that the dye lot of the two new skeins did not match up with the four original skeins.  I briefly considered exchanging it all, but ultimately was too lazy decided that it would be ok somehow.

 Now, I'm a pretty smart lace knitter, and after a little bit of messing around with the pattern and yarn I realized that the original four skeins were just the right amount to do the center and the two newer skeins were just the right amount to do the border.  Problem solved!  Even if they were just a wee bit different it wouldn't matter.

 

So I started knitting....

 

...and today I hit the halfway point in the center.  Yay!

 

Which is when I realized that in a recent stash reorganization I'd managed to screw up whatever plan I'd had to keep the two dye lots separate....umm....and I'd tossed the tags from the first two skeins I had used...which I'd wound one at a time...and now I had two different dye lots with two skeins each....and...umm...there was no way to tell which one matched the yarn already used.

 

Sigh.

 

It's one of the dumber things my little knitter brain has done.

 

A 50/50 chance of getting it right is NOT good enough when it potentially means finishing and blocking a shawl before you notice a possible difference in the dye lot colors.  (If you are lucky, there isn't a problem, but dye lots do vary, and I've seen a lot of finished projects that have a weird, sometimes slight, sometimes not so slight color change.)

 

I was relatively sure I remembered which was which, but I wasn't quite ready to commit.

 

But then I had an idea....

 And I pulled the book off of my shelf and started flipping through....

and got really, really darn lucky.

Crisis averted!