Insert crazed cursing here.

Something went horribly wrong with my Vandyke lace panel socks. Several things went horribly wrong. In fact, shy of not bursting into spontaneous combustion on my needles, everything went wrong with my socks.

I dropped a stitch or misplaced a stitch or a stitch was abducted by aliens somewhere in the lace panel. I tried to fix it, but the more I tried to fix it, the more things went horribly, horribly wrong. I cursed like a drunken, crazed sailor at a Drunken Crazed Sailor Cursing Contest. I had to resist the urge to frog the whole thing and feed the remains to any hungry moths that passed by.

You see, I don't know enough about lace to effectively fix things when they go wrong. When a stitch drops in stockinette, it's no problem, because they drop in a very predictable way. When a lace stitch drops, it does the Hokey Pokey and it turns itself around. In the end, I just pulled out a few rounds until a circle of mostly plain-looking stitches poked up and I picked them up.

Everything is fine now. I suppose the upside is that I have a little more confidence in myself to fix errors now. On the downside, I still have a lingering hatred of lace.

Flaws

In high school, I knew this girl who always looked very chic. She had this one particular outfit that was like this... black stretchy catsuit... thing. She wore a sash over her hips and ballet slippers. It looked very French. I always was impressed by how slim she looked in this outfit. I was born with a poochy belly, you see, and no number of sit-ups ever made a dent in it. This girl confessed that her catsuit thing was, in fact, concealing an assortment of supportive undergarments. She had control-top pantyhose, a girdle, and possibly a waist cincher. She was actually the bearer of a pooch and cellulite. She said one of her big fears was that she'd get into a car accident and the EMTs would end up exposing all her infrastructure. You'd think she would be more worried about injury, but we were 17. We had different priorities then.

Anyway, I thought of this today as I started the second picot hem of my Vandyke socks. Somehow, even though I was doubly careful with this hem, I ended up with many more difficulties than with the first. I tried to fix the mistakes as best I could, because the thought of starting over was too much to bear. The outside of the hem looks pretty good, but the inside of the hem--like the inside of Catsuit Girl's outfit--is full of structural secrets and flaws. The inside of this hem is all cellulite, but you have to look really really closely to tell.

If anyone that close to my ankles while I'm wearing these socks, I'm going to kick them.