Confessions of a Lazy Knitter

So I ran into some issues yesterday. The DF was casting on his 3rd project (French Market Bag) last night, so I was intermittently giving him tips, telling him he does it all wrong, and otherwise scrutinizing his every move.

Side note: DF finished knitting his second project earlier this week and it's just waiting to be felted. I'm still impressed with his quick progress: on that project he learned to provisionally cast on, cast off and cast on in the middle of the round, graft together with Kitchener Stitch, pick up stitches, and decrease in new ways (SSK, K3Tog, and Slip 1, K2Tog, PSSO). I feel like a soccer mom talking about her kids' school projects.

Back to the story. As I was heckling him, I decided to work in my fifth color on Charlotte. Karma's a bitch. Laughing at other people will come back to bite you in the butt. I finished the row and turned the work around to purl back. Lo and behold, after the half-way mark I noticed something wasn't right. Careful inspection showed I had shifted everything over by one stitch. For those not intimate with the Charlotte pattern, the knit stitch between the two decreases should be centered exactly over the point you see a couple of rows down. But it's not. It's one stitch to the left. I realized that I had added in one knit stitch in this pattern repeat at the beginning of the repeat instead of at the end. Doh!

Which wouldn't be so bad, and perhaps I could live with it if it were just one repeat. But it was more like 8. It was the entire section up to the white stitch marker. Sigh. I think that would definitely show up. But I really didn't want to rip back a whole row to fix it. Yes, I'm THAT lazy. Then I slapped my head and realized it was just the row beneath where I was currently, and I could just tink from there.

I dropped the working yarn and turned the work around. I started tinking back the section as if I had just knit it placing the tinked stitches on my left needle and creating a large loop of unworked yarn. The yarn I was using to purl back is coming out the left side of the picture. The last stitch I had purled on my current row is the blue one just to the right of the stitch marker. The pink stitches on the left needle are therefore stitches from 2 rows below the purl row I'm supposed to be working.

At any rate, I held the big loop of yarn as if it were my working yarn (see left) and knit back in the correct pattern until I got to my last purled stitch. I think it worked just fine. I guess I could have tinked all 8 sections that I screwed up and then use the large loop to knit back to where I left off, but somehow, I felt better tinking and correcting in sections.

Anyway, here's a close up of the fixed section.

Frustration averted, I called it quits. Yes, indeed, I managed to get a whopping TWO rows of knitting done. Since I haven't posted any progress pics on this project in a while, here it is. It's getting to the size where I can't photograph it on my desk anymore. I have to put it on the floor and stand over it to get the whole thing in frame. You can't tell, but it measures about 20" from the center of the neck edge to the current row.