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.

Does Anyone

see a mistake here? Of course not; I fixed it! With a lot of help from "Other Sally" (there are two Sallies-one who knits at the shop and one who knits and works at the shop. Those of us who didn't know her last name just shout Other Sally and she knows who we mean) at knit night last night. She had recently had the same problem and I benefited from her experience.
Now I can knit on. DH asked me if I learned anything from fixing the error--- which took almost all of last night's session. Why yes, I did. I learned to NEVER make this mistake again!

Does Anyone

See a mistake here?
I do. One of the cables goes over instead of under. DH says it's on the back of the sweater and no one will notice. But I know it's there and it will bug me. And I suspect younger daughter would notice it too and it will be---if I EVER finish it---her sweater.

But not to worry; I have a theory and a plan. I THINK that I can put the stitches on either side of the eight stitches involved on holders and then just un-knit those eight stitches, and re-knit them correctly. I think it might work.

I will take it with me to knit night tomorrow so that if I lose patience or get really, really upset, someone will stop me from throwing the whole thing across the shop or from ripping the whole thing back.

I hope.

Mistakes Were Made, Again

My older daughter, the writer/copy-editor, calls that sentence an example of the use of the past exonerative verb tense. (There is no such tense, but I like the idea of it.) No one MADE the mistakes; mistakes were MADE (not by me, not by you, not by anyone apparently. They just happened! Really!)

So that's what I'm claiming about the hole you see in this scarf I'm making. It is the Ripple Scarf from Luxury Yarn One-Skein Wonders: 101 Small Indulgences. I had said that I would never make this scarf again. I had said that I would never work with black yarn again because of this sweater, which I long ago attempted to make in black mohair. And yet, here I am, again, making the scarf from h*ll with not one, but two, black yarns knit together, the perfect storm of misery.

I had been zipping right along, making no mistakes, and feeling that I had conquered the pattern that was so deceptively easy that making mistakes had just been too easy the first time I attempted the scarf. And suddenly, I looked at the whole of what I had knitted, and there it was...

the huge hole.....

How had it gotten there? Obviously, I had dropped a stitch, but then how did I have the correct number of stitches to work the pattern from that point on? I had counted each row...twenty stitches...and just kept on knitting. It's a mystery.

I was going to shove the whole thing in its project bag and take to to the LYS on Wednesday, when Jan, our Yoda, is there to solve problems for us. But then I thought that if I am, as I sometimes claim, a process knitter more than I am a product knitter, why should I object to taking the rows out? Certainly that's what Jan would tell me to do (or offer to do for me, not that I'm intimidated by ripping out lace or anything). And if I don't mind knitting, stitch by stitch, why should I mind un-knitting, stitch by stitch?

So I did, and it took about forty minutes to go back the five or six rows I had knit after the dropped stitch. I had been warned by another knitter when I picked out the sequined yarn that I had better be careful with the knitting because frogging it back was difficult with the sequins getting caught in stitches. How much fun was ripping this back? Exactly none. My knitting friend was right.

But in another twenty minutes or so, I re-knit the rows I had frogged, and now the scarf looks just fine. But I am being really, really careful from now on.

And I still don't know how I continued to knit, having the correct number of stitches for the lace pattern, when I had a dropped stitch unravelling.

And I'm sticking with the past exonerative tense. It just happened, all by itself. Really!