Rats! Dagnabit! Poop! I hope no one has been offended by my outpouring of profanity. I spent last night in what I euphemistically call “negative knitting.” You know, the times when you sit down to knit and end up with less than you started with? The problem began when I picked up the Lily of the Valley stole. I hadn’t knitted on it in a week or so because I really wanted to finish this:

Yes, the only positive element of the week (knitting-wise, anyway) – I finished the front of St. Enda. As I was working along on my little nupps, I thought, “Gee, these aren’t as hard as I remembered.” After four rows I realized there was a good reason for this. I was making 5 stitch nupps instead of 7 stitch nupps. Since it was only four rows, I laboriously tinked back. I was ready to start again, when I realized, to my great horror, that about halfway down there were a couple of nupps where I had not picked up all 7 stitches and there was one lone little stitch poking its head out! How in the world had I not noticed this before? Now, the directions tell you this can happen and that you can just go back later and tie them in. But I have this great aversion to having extra yarn ends to weave in, in addition to having a somewhat obsessive personality. And since I was still so early in the shawl, I decided to frog. So I took it off the needles, frogged back to one row before the errors (at least they were on the same row!) and tinked from there.

I have discovered the way to prevent this in the future is (drum roll, please), to actually PAY ATTENTION to my knitting. Novel concept, huh? It is a relatively easy task to check each nupp on the return knit row. You can obviously see if any stitches have failed to catch on the previous purl row and correct them immediately, without frogging, ripping, tinking or anything resembling such. And I found two on the very first row. Made a believer out of me.

Anyway, I was so upset that I decided to cast on for another scarf. I know, I have the attention span of a fruit fly. However, after three tries, I was not pleased with any of the patterns. This is the latest attempt – what do you think? I think it is too open – not enough “fabric”.

Meanwhile, Izzy, back in England, was blissfully unconcerned with all of this, because she found someone to hold hands with while she sleeps.