There will be blood

I took last night's knitting catastrophe to the local yarn shop for repairs. The employee couldn't figure out what I had done, although it didn't matter how I got the stitches in that state but how she could fix them.

Everything seemed to be going along fine. Then she tugged on the cable to get the magic loop. Out popped the cable from the join. She was able to put it back in and continue working on my mistakes on the hat, but I wondered if this cable was now shot too.

I'm not having much luck with the 32" Options cables. This was one of the replacements I was sent. Are they just not suited to magic loop? Is there something I'm doing wrong? Is there any way I can reattach the cable more permanently? I don't want to call Knit Picks and ask for another replacement.

Since she had been able to finish cleaning up my errors, I resumed knitting with this cable. It looked like it was in. You can see what's coming, can't you?

I finished the first round and went to make one of the loops bigger. That's when the cable came out of the join again and took several stitches in the middle of the round with it. I tried my best to salvage them, but I know that I multiplied the problem as I tried to pick up the dropped stitches. Frankly, it's a disaster.

I'm not sure what to do now. I'd feel horribly guilty about going back to the shop to get this fixed. I'm tempted to take the entire project off the needles and start ripping, probably prior to where I began decreasing. (Undoing decreased stitches confuses me a lot.) Even if I do that, how in the world do I get the project back on the needles?

I'm close to giving up and not knitting all weekend. I have work that I need to do, so maybe it's not a terrible idea. While I'd been hoping to give this hat and another one yet to be started as gifts on Monday, I don't think I'll have anything finished by then. I was so close to being done with this one. Not anymore.