Pay attention!!

I am SO mad at myself. Last night I was working on the fishnet lace scarf I'm making out of the Artyarns Beaded Silk. It's simple -- one row of k2tog yo and one row of knitting. Just to make positive sure I keep a counter on one needle and switch back and forth from 1 to 2 - pattern row and knit row. Fool proof, right? Well, not for THIS fool! I was just coming to the end of my first skein and wasn't sure if I had enough yarn to make it across one last time. Since this yarn is so precious I thought I'd give it a try but somewhere near the middle of the row it was apparent I wasn't going to make it. So I grabbed the end of the second skein and knit a stitch with the old yarn and the new one together, as I normally do, then dropped the old yarn and picked up the new one and knit to the end of the row but when I got to 3 stitches to the end I thought I was off a stitch. Now here's where I went wrong -- what I should have done is look at my stitch counter to see what row I was on and then double check that by looking at the end of the scarf because I can tell by where the starting tail is hanging. I didn't do that. No. I started tinking back, assuming I was on a 1 row when I was on a 2 row. What a mess!! I finally took the needle out and ripped back until I could see a pretty clear row of loops and then fed the needle through them, hoping for the best. To my credit I managed to get all but 3 squares of the pattern right but those six stitches, after going back across, are just not right. I can't bring myself to rip the thing out again. That's an entire skein, one half of the scarf. I rationalize it this way - when I'm wearing the scarf the wonky row will be at my neck, under my hair and nobody will see it. I'm just so mad at myself though!

I have decided to resurrect Liesel. The last time I worked on it was when I was in California last Christmas and I thought I had goofed it up while I was knitting at my sister's and the wind was blowing and I had my contacts in and got something in them. But when I took it out yesterday to look at it and counted the stitches it looked fine to me. Anyway the yarn is 100% cashmere and it would be a great Christmas gift if I don't keep it myself. (How many scarfs can a girl use?) I hate working from charts though so I painstakingly wrote out the 10 rows of the pattern and then found that the designer had already done it. That's what I'm going to do for the Frost Flowers Stole - I'm going to write out the pattern rather than trying to work with the chart because charts drive me crazy.

It's gotten a little bit colder here. Still there is no snow in the mountains, which is a shame for the skiers. But as I was leaving this morning I saw the neighbor across the street scraping ice off their car windows and I could see frost on roofs on the way to work. The wind chill was biting. Thank goodness I start my ride uphill so I can warm up quickly.