Appearances are deceiving

My knit to quit BSJ looks really nice, and I told Husband over coffee that I should have it completed this morning for his coworker.

I pulled out my pattern to find out where I was starting for the day. Then I looked at my sweater. Unhappily, where I'm starting turns out to be ripping back several inches of beautifully even striped garter stitch. Another offering to the Frog Prince of Knitting, who routinely sucks up yards of my yarn as quickly as Lady and the Tramp suck up their spaghetti.

At first glance, nothing seems wrong, which must be why it got this far. But a closer look shows there's no neck opening for the poor little bèbè to stick his adorable little head through. The cast off neck stitches also add inches to the width of the sweater. Oy! Munchkin sweater indeed... How did I flub this badly and not know it?

Knowing better rarely means doing better

We all know this story. Most of us have done the same thing, more than once. We knit merrily away on a pattern we know well, or think we know well. The knitting is just peachy and then something looks a bit off.  For me it was this: I'm almost to the 158 stitch count, but don't have anywhere near the 90 stitches needed between the stitch markers. To ignore this little something in the middle is to court knitting disaster, so I stop, count the complete number of stitches on my needle, quickly compare against the pattern, find the total is correct, shrug my shoulders then trust that my little something in the middle will resolve itself, much like a Who trusts that Christmas is coming all the same.

What I didn't catch was that I missed the instruction to cast off 5 stitches, keep working even until I hit 158 stitches. I can hear my great-grandmother saying "Aie!Yi!Yi! chère. You know better." as she shakes her head at me. Heaven knows I heard THAT all through my childhood. Heaven knows I say it to myself at least once in every knitting project, shaking head and all.

A bad move, nay, a stunningly bad move on my part. The only explanation I can think of is that I was seriously decaffeinated at the time, yeah that's it. So now I get to frog those lovely, lovely stripes and do them again, remembering to cast off for the neck stitches so that a) baby will have a place to rest it's precious head  and b) the sweater will be large enough to fit a real human child.

Of course, it's a recoverable error, but it's one that forces me to eat crow yet again, because Husband has likely told his co-worker that I'm almost done.

When you eat crow, does it taste like humble pie?  Why, yes it does.