Since I last wrote about my latest efforts in the field of knitting cryptology, I actually finished clue 1 of my Call of the Siren shawl!

It was about that time I noticed a problem

There’s a pretty noticeable color shift about one and a half pattern repeats before the end of the section.  Maybe it was the lighting.  Somehow. Maybe it was light from Venus reflected off of some swamp gas.  I decided to go do something else for a little while and see if it looked different when I came back.

Nope.  Still different.

I posted a question about it on the project thread on the Lattes & Llamas group on Ravelry.  Got a very thoughtful and helpful answer from one of the designers giving me a good idea of how the color progression should be going for the different clues, reminding me that this is hand dyed yarn and the amounts of each color was going to be different in different skeins and just generally giving me a pep talk.  She thought it would probably be fine.

Still though…

That’s a pretty big section of the next set of colors.

After thinking about it for a while, I decided to weigh my skeins.  Each one was 100 grams at the start, the project has 5 clues, so 20 grams or so of each should have been used up.  The skein with the orange in it was a little light at 79 grams.  That’s reasonable.  The skein with blue in it though – that was 76 grams. Too much used up. Too much for even me to ignore it.

I hate ripping back, really I do.  But I hate it even more when I keep going on a project even when I know it’s going awry, and then don’t use it or wear whatever it is, or can’t finish because I ran out of yarn.  So off to the frog pond it went.

And I have started again with a needle one size down.  It will take a little while to catch back up, but I’m feeling better about it. The siren will rise back up from the murky depths of the frog pond!*

*Like a phoenix, but wetter.