Guess I'm doing fine

Looks like Knit Picks will be getting another sock yarn order from me. I have around four inches of knitting remaining on the sock. There may be enough to finish the foot, but I will probably come up short on the toe. To think that when I placed the order I wondered if one ball would be sufficient for two socks. I'll cross my fingers that yarn from the same dye lot is available. Otherwise I'll need two more.

Yesterday I wrote about how I've come to understand that being a knitter is a key part of who I am. (As always, thank you for the wonderful comments. Whether you're a longtime or new reader, I appreciate your feedback.) It's hard for me to believe that the guy who struggled to see where his mistakes were, let alone manage to fix them, in the early months can now spot them and usually figure out where things went wrong and repair the errors. I had to do it again tonight when I discovered I was short a stitch on my instep needle and had one too many on one of the sole stitch needles. You're probably assuming that I knit an extra instep stitch onto a different needle. That wasn't the case.

A few rounds earlier I knit the last sole stitch on the needle twice or got a wraparound. I dropped the last stitch on the needle holding the instep stitches. I tried the sock on to see how it fit, so I'm guessing I knocked it off when sliding the WIP onto my foot. I was curious how it would feel. It's probably going to be too loose at the top, perhaps because there is no cuff. (It's all k2, p2 ribbing from the top to the heel flap.) Maybe I'll cast on four fewer stitches for the next one, or should I hope that it'll shrink slightly after being washed?

Obviously it's aggravating to make these mistakes, but as I tell the students learning TV production, they learn more when they mess up. Not to get all philosophical--meaning that's exactly what I'm going to do--but isn't that how life is? We don't like to make mistakes, but our biggest breakthroughs tend to come from how we learn and deal with our shortcomings. As upsetting as our knitting errors can be--remember that second sock I still need to frog?--they're not so critical in the grand scheme of things. Think of them as good tests of our patience.

Remind me I said this the next time I moan about my latest major screw-up.