In which I play the fool...

Oh what fun! I get to tell you about a screw up!

I was really making time with the mittens. I had my groove on and was having a great ole time. At lunch I was knitting with Holly, it being Tuesday, and I started the decreases. Woohoo! But I got it backwards, I did a left-leaning where I should have done a right-leaning decrease and vice versa. So I decided to pick it down and fix it. Four rows of decrease. The first three went fine, but I wasn't satisfied with the way the fourth one looked. It was just sloppy, but otherwise fine.

Do you hear those alarm bells ringing?

So I decided to rip. I just pulled those needles out and ripped back about four rows of stranded knitting in that teeny tiny gauge. Want to guess how successful I was at getting the thing back on the needles? Yeah. Not so very. Lunch was over and I stuffed the whole thing in my knitting bag to deal with at home.

Working on it tonight, I just couldn't figure it out. I tried going down one more row, but the stitches wouldn't come out in pattern. I decided to put in a life line a few more rows down, so I could match up the pattern all away around. And that's when I noticed the HUGE problem. Take a look for yourself.

Correctly patterned

Oh so very wrong

Can you see the difference? The diamond at the top should be closed.

So now I'm putting in my life line lower. A lot lower. Once I get this baby in everything should be okay. All I have to do is pick up every stitch all the way around, on the same row, in the same direction. That's all. Just that.

I guess I'm lucky I caught it while the mitten was still in progress. It would really have burned to notice the problem when the thing was blocked, or worse yet, entered into the Western Fair!