Errata

This weekend was supposed to be one of great knitting productivity and success but has spiraled into one of seasonal allergy misery, headaches, and knitting errors aplenty.

For instance, I cast on late last night to begin the Chevron Stripes Hand Towel from Mason-Dixon Knitting. I soon found that CotLin sheds like a long-haired cat, although the discovery didn't bother me that much. I finished my first five rows of garter stitch, switched colors from Moroccan Red to Crème Brulee, and began the first row with the increases and decreases which had put me off knitting this earlier.

Everything was fine, albeit slow, as I neared the end of the row. Then I noticed that I wasn't going to have enough stitches to do what the directions were telling me to do. Hmm. It was at this point that the metaphorical light bulb blinked on above my head. I remembered looking at the pattern on Ravelry a couple weeks ago and saw that it listed errata. Too bad I didn't recall this.

I picked up the project this afternoon and hastily went about frogging. Now it is a big step for me to take the whole thing off the needles and ripping rather than methodically unknitting stitch by stitch, but with the decreases complicating matters, I was feeling more courageous. I frogged the offending row and two rows of perfectly acceptable garter stitch for good measure because, well, why not?

I carefully reinserted the needle to pick up the stitches, paused to count, and then resumed. Of course, it's when I took this break that I managed to drop a stitch. No problem, I thought. I saw it, stuck a needle through it to keep it in place, and went to slip it into place when I approached it. That's when I dropped a couple more. So...rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrip. Let's begin again.

Begin the begin. Once at the incorrect row in the pattern I stared at the correction on my laptop screen and slowly did what it told me. I was a at least halfway through it when I had the uneasy feeling that I had been forgetting to do something else. I looked at the book. Hey, I haven't been doing those k3. Blast! As for the stitches...and then there were none as I ripped it all out again...

...and realized that the k3 is nowhere to be found in the errata on the website. You see, I noticed that the book didn't have the k5 at the beginning of the row. That's the only fix I assumed needed to happen. What I failed to recognize was that the book was lacking the k5 to start the row and unnecessarily included a k3 in the repeated section for most of the row. What I had been doing was correct.

Needless to say, I have given the needles a timeout since these woeful mistakes. Perhaps they'll work properly after having a night to think about their errors.