cutting your losses...

Things go wrong here. I hope I don’t give you the impression that everything is always perfect. It's nice to think you have mad skills but stuff happens, it doesn't just go right every single time. Sometimes you can fudge things with no one the wiser, but you need to know the difference, when you can get away with it, when to re-do and the best way to do it.
Ripping out lace is never a good thing, maybe a row or two but more than that, you’re actually spending double the time to rip out lace because it’s harder to un-transfer, especially those two-step ones where the stitch ends up in behind. Now, even though I think I’m watching what I’m doing, I didn’t see this until after it was off the machine and pressed out. First, I noticed that one side of the neckline looks wonky. What the?? I did see, early on, while it was still on the machine, there is a mistake in the patterning  near the start of the vee motif but I had done the same on each side so one could argue, was it really a mistake? Not glaring and most people would never see it, but I know it’s there. I was justifying it to myself as I continued…
After pressing out the piece and holding it up in the mirror, I thought, ‘oh, gosh, darn, rats!’ I calmly walked away, spent the evening catching up on my DVRs. Today, still not quite ready to admit defeat, I held it up and thought about ripping it back to the beginning of the neckline shaping. Note, there are no solid, plain rows in this pattern which would help with rehanging.
Add to the equation, I am a bit nervous about running out of ‘French navy’ for this project. Started with 200g (final weight of my ivory one, 230g, 42 finished bust) and thought that would be plenty. This is for Shannon, another very slim girl so am making finished 34, but she’s fairly tall, about 5’7, I think, so I added 20 rows to the length. My backup plan was using 50g of ‘twilight’ for the armhole and neck bands, which seemed feasible before I knit anything but now, looking at it, not so much. I could just abandon the whole thing and bake muffins, but I have a commitment, to myself anyway!
To be honest, I knit the second piece up the underarm, still trying to convince myself that the other side would/could be acceptable. At this point, I decided to reknit the lace on this piece and, then, off the machine, rip the other one back to the underarm, rehang it in the plain stockinette. It only took an hour and a half to get this one finished, no mistakes! Golden!