The errors of my ways

Kristin's Jazzy coffee cup cozy

Yarn: Dark Horse Yarns-Fantasy (50% nylon, 50% acrylic; worsted weight)
Color: 15 (shade of blue)
Needles: US 7 dpns
Stitches: 48

My first project knitted on dpns has been completed. The majority of it was knitted after my four and a half hour drive home from Champaign, Illinois. The festival wasn't friendly toward providing knitting time...or, for that matter, anything not related to the movies at hand. By their nature, film festivals return attendees to a state in which meeting the basics on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is as advanced as it gets.

I knitted the cozy well aware that there was a glaring mistake in it. Jenn told me that she believe there was an error in the pattern's decrease rows. She believed that it should say to work in the k1p1 pattern rather than knit all but the first two and last two. Her advice was well-intended, but as I knitted, I could see that she was wrong.

At first I didn't notice any problems, but as I neared the end of the first row after decreasing, I saw that the knit and purl stitches were off by one. I assumed I had done something wrong, but I couldn't figure out what. Correctly or not--actually, incorrectly--I kept going. Everything was fine on the next row.

I figured it out when I was knitting it tonight. K2tog and ssk at the start and end of the row throw that pattern off if you work k1p1 in between. My thinking was that k2tog and ssk took care of the k1p1 for those stitches in the decrease rows, but it didn't occur to me that they would be out of step with the other stitches in the following rows. So there's no error in the pattern.

I could have undone everything, but I decided to keep going with the same mistake. I wanted to see how it looked, and I couldn't bear the thought of ripping it all out. Thus, you'll notice that the ribbing is almost diagonal.

There were other mistakes too, such as in the joined area picture above. It looks fine where I joined the piece in the round, but I must have dropped one or two stitches at the end. I thought the joined area was strangely loose as I knitted row after row. Again, I initially placed the blame on my abilities and the awkwardness of knitting with four needles. My best guess is that two stitches slipped off the third needle in my haste of putting the project in my bag and removing it. I picked up one stitch, but that gave me an odd number. Rather than pick up another, I did an ssk. I attribute such bad decision making to the fatigue of the festival clouding my thinking.

The real brain scrambler was how I suddenly found myself with all the stitches on two needles rather than three. It took me several moments before deducing that I kept knitting with one of the needles and didn't bring the newly empty needle back into play.

Although the cozy has some obvious mistakes, it looks better than those I've knitted on straights. Those cozies have gaps between stitches in the rows after casting on and before binding off, a problem eliminated by using dpns.

Hopefully the next one knitted on dpns will turn out the way it should. The dpn learning curve wasn't too bad, although I still need to find a way to make this method feel more comfortable. The four needle method has one thing going for it, though. To the neophyte and non-knitter, it looks impressive because it appears to be harder than it is.