Constant distractions are the name of the game lately. My DD (3.5 years) and DS (almost 1.5 years) have been wonderful. They have also been wonderful distractions. For the second time in two days I have found a major error in my Cleopatra's Stockings.
This is a beautiful pattern married with some truly lovely yarn in shades of blue and purple. Traveling stitches cross and recross up the instep and the back of the leg reminiscent of ribbons laced around the foot in ancient sandals. At my Monday night knitting group I got to the top of one of the crossings and found I had one spare stitch on one side and three spare stitches on the other. Ack!
After some diagnosis, I determined the error.. over twelve rows back. (Actually I'm still not sure exactly what I did wrong, but I know exactly where it was.) Since this pattern uses traveling stitches and this error offset those twisted stitches, my problem crossed over almost 14 stitches in those twelve rows.. one entire DPN. I winced at the mere thought of dropping an entire DPN back twelve rows and pulling back up stitches on these teeny-tiny-size-0 needles. Furthermore, not only was the problem going to involve a massive amount of re-knitting on that one panel of the sock, but because I am doing this on two sets of DPNs at the same time, I made the same mistake ON BOTH SOCKS. Horror! Maybe it would make sense to drop back that much for a sweater, but these are socks. How much are people really going to notice?
If it had been a smaller mistake, I might have tried to cover it up. I fussed at it for fifteen minutes, trying to figure out if I could twist one stitch over two to make up the difference or some other 'fix', and just couldn't get it to work. That angle was just wrong. It was going to show and it was going to bother me every time I wore the socks. So I pulled out my super-small needles (one set of 00's and one set of 000's) and wove them into the row just before the problem.... and then ripped out a couple hours of work. Whee.
Then yesterday, as I closed in on getting back to where I had been before Monday night, I found I had knit in yet another mistake. This time it was only one side of one sock over eight stitches. I grabbed a spare needle and laced it down the lower edge of the traveling stitches (to save me pulling up those stitches) and then dropped out the rest and knit them back up. I wish I had taken a picture of all the loops of hanging yarn and extra needles stuck in every which way. It was impressive if I have to say so myself. The gauge is just a wee bit wonky through that section, but I think it's going to pull itself nice and even after one wearing of the sock.
After this practice "tinking" I'm feeling rather proud of myself. My knitting friends think I'm a bit crazy. I'm earning a title of "process knitter", "perfectionist", "OCD", or perhaps just flat-out insane. I just know that I like for it to be correct, and I'm willing to practice any skill that will let me get it that way.
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