So Many Mistakes. So Little Time

Only negative progress this weekend. Sweet Indulgence spent the weekend playing among the lily pads.

There's no excuse. I know better. I may have been knitting for only a little over a year, but I do know better. I did it anyway.

I applied chart logic to written pattern directions. It seems I need to state the obvious to myself: Charts only show the pattern rows, so you double the number of rows for any given charted line, one pattern row and one purl back row. Four rows in a chart equal 8 rows of knitting. This is not how written instructions work. If a written pattern says "repeat four rows" it really means just those 4 rows.

Sadly, knitting twice as many rows for the waist decreases is not the error that has me most annoyed. The infuriating mistake was the correction. I painstakingly ran a lifeline to save most of the work. I ripped back, restored the needle, replaced the stitch markers and did the knitting correctly - with the yarn I had just frogged.

Yarn that has been knit up stretches. Did I cut off the ravelled yarn and set it aside to rest -- or, should it prove recalcitrant, to have a nice soak --and get rewound? Did I give it a chance to return to its natural, or at least a somewhat less stretched state while I did the smart thing and joined a fresh skein?

In a word, no.

Do I have a lot more yarn left at the end of my final row than I should have?

Well, maybe not a lot. But enough. Significantly more than the 5 or 6 inch tail that I had left before I joined the new skeins.

Sweet Indulgence will be sent back to gambol with the tadpoles. I'm going to end this whole project monogamy thing right here, right now. I'm thinking about an Einstein coat.

Maybe the brilliance will rub off on me while I knit?