Success and Failure

This was a success -- leftover steak sliced up, fried in a cast iron skillet with some red onion and smothered in Trader Joe's bacon cheddar. Served over half a naan with some fresh spinach. 

But for every success there is a failure -- and this failure was particularly painful! I realized several inches into the patterning of my White Pine Cardigan that I'd made a mistake with the cabling (I've never read from a chart before...). I decided to go back and repair, rather than rip out. It was kind of exciting to realize that I can now rip out just a few stitches and repair them, rather than frogging back most (or all!) of the project, as I would have had to do when I first started knitting. Then, as I was finishing up the cable repairs, I realized that I had COMPLETELY messed up both side panels. Rather than the seed stitch pattern, I was doing ribbing. It looked awful, and the seed stitch is one of the "features" of this particular cardigan. I was even less thrilled about frogging back all of my pattern work (so many cables!), and decided to tear out just the side panels. This actually "kind of" worked -- I used double-point needles, and had some success with this method. 

But this is a naturally twisty yarn, and by the time I reached the end of each row the yarn was quite taut. Add to that the difficulty of correct tension over such a long section, and it was really just not right. Blocking might help, but then again, it might not. Of course, I only decided this after I had repaired both sections... So after hours of extensive "time-saving" repairs, I frogged back to the beginning of the pattern work. *sigh* 

Fortunately, all of that practice has paid off, and things are going much better now. I'm actually further along now than I was in the "repair" picture above. Quite honestly, I feel that a lot of the problems I've had are due to the way the pattern is written. I actually copied it into a Word document and split up each step, because it's all sort of mushed together in the original pattern, with no clear divisions between steps. There are fewer stitch counts than I've ever seen (which I find very helpful to see if I'm on the right track), and lots of "continue in pattern" when it's not exactly clear what the new pattern is. You're not even told if the first decrease is on the right or the wrong side of the garment! I've spent so much time just puzzling over the pattern (even my revised copy). Right now I'm repairing the seed stitch section (AGAIN!), because I don't like the way the decreases turned out (admittedly, I didn't slip-slip-purl correctly) and I've decided to omit them altogether rather than risk wonky side panels. Hopefully it won't turn out too boxy. I really love this pattern, but between the extensive twisted ribbing and the confusing directions, I'm a bit disappointed. Perhaps I'll feel better once it's done!

Success and failure. There's a balance, I suppose?