Oh what a tangled web we weave

When first we practice to deceive.  (Sir Walter Scott (Marmion, 1808) 

This is a tangled web, but it's not deception. It's murder.

Murder of those horrible, nasty, HUNGRY moths that ruin knit projects.

The photo is of an unknown number (I don't want to know how many I have knit) of wool, alpaca and silk scarves, wraps and I don't know what-all, sitting in my car, which is sitting in the sun. This is the south. It's hot out, y'all, so this should work, so they say.

They say that if the car temperature reaches 130 degrees for a couple of hours, all of the moths and baby moths and larvae will be DEAD. DEAD. I found a hole of unknown origin in one of my beloved scarves, so this is step one (murder) before step two when I put everything in a space bag for the summer.

Who are they you ask and why do I trust them?  Because they are sources on the interwebs, and so their information must be true. Every one of these items was hand-knit by yours truly, and I would cry and sob if anything happened to them because of those sneaky moths.  

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.