And the beat goes on

Yesterday's knitting struggles gave way to more knitting difficulty today.

Thinking that I might have twisted stitches when I joined in the round, I pulled the yarn off the needles and started over. I decided to give one of the problematic 32" cables another chance. I had the bright idea to pull the loop through the last cast on stitch that needed to be slipped to the left needle for joining in the round. I figured that would cut down on the chance of twisting stitches. It seemed to work.

Knitting the first round was relatively smooth, so I thought I was in the clear. I wish. The second round was OK for awhile, but as I got near the end of it, the stitches needed a significant amount of coaxing to budge forward. Placing my right index finger on the left needle tip to get some stitches off led to a painful moment when the point jabbed me good and hard. Aggravated again, I set the knitting aside for most of the day.

I picked it up this evening and had a lightbulb moment. Could it be that I'm wrapping the yarn too tightly? I reduced the yarn tension, but the last third of the round continues to give me trouble. Few stitches glide on the needles. Most need a lot of pushing, the latter ones especially. Sometimes that gets the job done, sometimes it doesn't. I'm very annoyed about this. Does anyone have a solution? I'm thinking about knitting this onto a 24" cable, but I don't know how that would fix the tightness problem.

I have encountered one issue relative to the 32" cable. If I'm not careful when pulling the excess through, it makes a knot around another part of the cable. That's taken some thought to determine how to get it undone.

Knitting is supposed to be relaxing. Right now it's anything but.