One step forward, two steps back...

I'm sure I've used that as a blog post title before!

I got some nasty virus on top of my long-running bacterial infection this week, so I was home and just FLAT for three days — barely touched the computer (I know, shocking!). But yesterday afternoon I felt a bit better, well enough to finally knit, and I pulled out my old Khaki Cables project, which has been stalled for too long. I really need to free up some size 5 needles, and this puppy is.. er, WAS .. so close to done... just needed to finish up the right front, seam, and knit the button band.

The hardest part of finishing this darned thing has been figuring out where I was and how many rows I needed to knit. I had done a poor job of keeping track of my hatchmarks (my oh-so-sophisticated method of row counting), so I wasn't sure which pile of them referred to the left front, and I had to figure it out to make the sides match. I go through about 45 minutes of thinking and figuring every time I pick the project up again. Finally I thought I knew where I was (and I was right, at least), so I picked it up and knit about 14 rows. Then I realized that somewhere along the way, I'd dropped a stitch in the long cable, so I dropped that whole 20-stitch cabling section back 11 (!) rows and reknit it with the picked-up stitch. (By the way: it is MESSY to do that.) And I continued knitting until I'd done 27 rows.

And something felt wrong.

I did a lot of counting — of sets of cables, of stitches, on both the finished and unfinished fronts. And it was indeed wrong. On the buttonband/neck edge, I was too far decreased for the distance I'd knit — by about two stitches. Doesn't sound like much, but in this very charted pattern, it was going to be brutally obvious. I knew I had to rip back, but how far?

I found all the decreases in the left front and marked them with split ring markers, then found all decreases in the right front and did the same.

Lo and behold, turns out that two rows BEFORE I was supposed to start the neckline decreases, I'd inexplicably, randomly decreased two stitches. I have no idea why. I had made no note of this.

I ripped back.

FIFTY-THREE ROWS.

Just sayin'. :-)