Oooops!

Thursday night I was congratulating myself on saving around 7 hours of tinking and reknitting.

Here's the mistake I found (luckily in only 2 repeats of the pattern).

See how the 'v' of the feathers is skewed to the left. This is what happens when you think you know the pattern, and don't bother counting.

With no lifelines, and the knowledge that each row takes around 1/2 an hour to knit. I decided to be brave. Armed with a couple of dpns and a crochet hook, I slipped the offending section of stitches off each needle, and unravelled them down to where I'd gone wrong (being careful to keep each row's strip of yarn carefully organised).

Then using the dpns and the crochet hook, I reknitted the stitches, one row at a time. It wasn't too bad, and I think it turned out ok. There is one lot of YOs that are a bit looser than the others, but a good block should sort that out.

I felt soooooo clever. I was ready to shout my cleverness from the rooftops.

But then, last night, I was looking at the key for the pattern again, and realised I'd made an even bigger mistake ...

Can you see?

The double decreases change partway through the project. Uh oh. When I picked the project up after months of neglect, guess who didn't double check the symbols on the chart. The change happens around the beginning of the second lot of 'eyes' (that's a lot of knitting ago).

I'm not unpicking it!

The thought of unpicking all that knitting - and even worse, rewinding the yarn onto the cone and ball (I'm using two strands held together) - is just too horrible to contemplate. This mistake has now tranformed into a 'design feature' (even though I like it better as written).

To finish off, here is a photo of a 'perfect' avocado that formed part of my delicious lunch on Thursday. Yum.