Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
when first we practice to deceive.

Yes, I know Sir Walter Scott wasn't talking about knitting, but he might have been if he had seen this: 

The sweater that has been torturing me suddenly seemed to make sense yesterday and I just knit like the wind, making PROGRESS for once.  I even made it to the decreases for the armholes.  

I was so encouraged that I kept on knitting, even though I had started making small mistakes, mistakes that were easy to fix.

And on I knit.

Until suddenly I had the wrong stitches in the wrong places for one set of cables. My apparently-tired mind figured it ALL out and fixed it, meaning that I sort of faked it, because really, who would know?  Anyone studying it closely enough to spot the errors would deserve to be smacked upside the head.  

But the faked fix didn't take. I still had the wrong number of stitches in the wrong places. This morning, with two cups of strong coffee in me, I frogged the six or seven (I don't even know and that is a bad sign) stitches and remade the cable. 

Success?

Nope. Now I have the wrong combination of purl and knit stitches for the other half of the cable.  

Attempted deceit didn't work.  I thought I could fake the fix and no one but me would ever know.  

Sir Walter Scott: Knitting Expert. 


And an update:

I have learned something valuable and I will pass it on to you.  Apparently it is not possible to fake repairs on cabled knitting when the cables sort of wander around the fabric.  After too many attempts to do this, and after too many times of thinking, incorrectly, that I could get away with it, the knitting demons (I am convinced that they exist) just totally rejected all my fixes. There were purl stitches where there should have been knit stitches and knit stitches where there should have been purl stitches. I don't know how or why. I had to take back all the rows I knitted yesterday, row by sad row, stitch by sad stitch.

I still don't understand WHY what I did didn't work.  But this is what I have ended up with tonight:

A tangled mess, indeed

It's very sad.  I'm very sad.

But determined, against all odds.

As Scarlett said:  ...tomorrow is another day.

And this time, this had better go perfectly...or else.  Or else what?  No idea.