No Use Crying

Like crying over spilt milk, there's no use crying over dropped stitches and other knitting errors. Unless of course, the knitting error is the knitter's oversight. Then it's considered appropriate to sit in the corner and weep. Just don't spill those tears into the wool or you may make felt, and then you'd really have something to cry about.

Last night, feeling rather proud of myself that I'd wrapped up my paperwork by 7PM sharp and despite the call-ins for both the afternoon and midnight shift nursing staff, it looked like I was going to make it to the cast on Ravelympic party going on at my friend's house. I didn't have time to whip up a dish to bring, so I stopped and bought the hostess a box of chocolates. I got to her house around 8:30 and we had 30 minutes to wait until we could turn on the television and pick up our knitting and knit during opening ceremonies for the Olympics.

I decided to start right in on my Wips-Dancing entry of the shawl. The shawl I've ignored since November. I counted my stitches and jumped right into an easy purl row, and then the pager went off and reality closed in. There was no getting out of doing a hospice death visit. While making call backs, I snarfed down as much food as I thought I could--while simultaneously trying to demonstrate that although starving, I still had some manners. I packed up my knitting and left.

Around 1 AM, I finished my paperwork, popped the top of the last bottle of Sam Adams Winter Lager (maybe my first mistake), picked up the knitting and settled in to watch a rerun of the opening ceremonies. I finished that purl row, flipped my work and started the complicated lace row. At the end of that row, close to 400 stitches, I realized that for some reason, I had 4 extra stitches. Uh-oh. Not good. I counted. Recounted and did that yet again. Still, I had 4 extra stitches and the dawning that I'd made a mistake of monumental proportions.

I had a fleeting memory of some unique issues with this pattern, did a search of my own blog and found the post that was nagging my brain. I had marked off the two border stitches on either end of the shawl to remind me to knit those stitches on the purl side, but in the pattern, the border stitches are included in the rows and not marked off separately on the pattern. I'd griped about that last year, and I forgot all about it. Nothing against the designer here, it's all my own fault for reading something into the pattern that was never there to begin with. In short, operator error.

So I started to tink and then thought, I'm tired. I'll go to bed and sleep on the problem. At circle this morning, I tinked some more and then out of frustration, ripped back to the lifeline. It's hell tinking lace. As of this writing, I've knit back only 6 rows of the 20 I ripped out and I'm way behind.

So far today, I've knit several thousand stitches, watched the ski jumpers and have settled in to watch the speed skaters. Those boys have some amazing assets.