4S: it's not me, it's you

Scarf/shawl/sock Saturday (or Sunday, if I forget to post on Saturday)

The veggie shawl is finished!

Here it is unblocked, about two and a half feet wide and a foot and a bit long:

Here it is on the rack, er, blocking board, now at just under four feet wide and two feet long:

I am rather merciless when I block lace.

The new shawl I started was going along swimmingly until I hit row 15 of the first chart, and then I ended up with an extra stitch where there shouldn't be one. I re-checked my work on the row below, and it was correct. The stitch markers hadn't worked their way under a stitch, which can sometimes happen and cause stitch counts to be off in a section. I re-checked my work on the active row, and that was correct, too.

I re-read the instructions, which mentioned having to move stitch markers around on four rows where there are double decreases. However, the row numbers listed for this in the instructions didn't match what I saw on the chart (ie, the designer made a boo boo when typing the instructions and was a row off, and the tech editor didn't catch it). Working on this late at night didn't help matters.

Funnily enough, while I was calling the project unladylike names, an old episode of Fawlty Towers was on. It was my favorite episode, which contains this scene, which I immediately related to:

Bless you, John Cleese, for showing me the absurdity of yelling at yarn. (And living mere feet away from a patch of woods means I could have run out the front door, found a sturdy tree branch, yanked it off the tree, and run back inside to beat the yarn. However, it was late at night, I was in my jim jams, and whatever would the neighbors think?) Instead, I calmly wrote out a post on Ravelry asking if anyone had encountered this problem while knitting this pattern. Then I went to bed.

Sleep being the great healer it is, I was in a better frame of mind to face the blasted project this morning. I also found a response to my post, which confirmed my suspicion of typing error, and the extra stitch is accounted for since it's on a double decrease row, which requires deliberately moving stitch markers.

There are three other rows on which this spiciness will occur, but I'm ready for them now.