I recently went back to work on the Swallowtail Shawl, started over the summer even though it was patently obvious I would never have enough time to work on it when school restarted. I even underwent dramatic repairs to the completed portion, and then I was unhappy with the results and ripped it all out again.
I would probably make a lot more progress on this thing, a lot faster, if I were not such a perfectionist that messing up one stitch makes me rip back two or three repeats in frustration, or rip the whole thing out and restart. But lately I've been using lifelines to mark "known good" rows and thus control the extent of the ripping back, and that's made things much better (except for that one time when I managed to pull a bunch of stitches off the needle when putting in a lifeline, of course).
See:
I'm on repeat 11 of 14 for the "budding lace 2" pattern. Apparently it gets much harder from here on in. I made the mistake of going to read the knitalong blog the other day, in which we see many knitters either knitting this thing very quickly (I just don't have that much time to knit), or totally freaking out about fairly simple things.
And here are my lifelines. I'm using one really long piece of string back and forth for the lifelines, so it's easier to manage if I leave it in for previous rows until I need more string.
