There Was An "Incident."

Does anyone else remember how Fred Flintstone looked in the old cartoon when he was on the grumpy side? When something of an unpleasant nature occurred to Fred (Wilma bought a new rock necklace to hold up her raggedy white toga-thingie, Barney blew the whole scam to go bowling on Mother's Day by suggesting to Betty that her toga-thingy made her look "hippy," Pebbles got knocked up by Bam-Bam...whatever) he'd get this look about him. His hammy hands would clench into fists, his shoulders rounded up to his ears, eyes would turn to triangles and he'd lurch purposefully forward mumbling something like, "Raggle-fraggle, gurgle-shumble, dingle-mingle!" The background scenery would scroll behind him in a seemingly endless repeat until he reached his final destination. That's sort of what The Sheep looked like today. Even the background phenomenon thing was goin' on since I seem to be in a bit of a rut lately.

Whilst working on sock #2 I, perhaps predictably, suffered a mishap. We shall, henceforth, refer to this and "the incident" and never speak directly of it. I was turning the heel and, if I do say so myself, creating quite the knitted work of art. In fact, I was amazed at how quickly I had worked all the stitches. That, in and of itself, should have been a hint.

It seems that a number of stitches had quietly escaped the end of the dpn as I was focusing on the opposite point. I have no idea when this happened and it was tricky to determine how many rows to rip back at that point. Please bear in mind that the "sox bug" has not nibbled on The Sheep in many a year and she is highly dependent on the pattern and strategically placed Post-its in order to maintain her place.

I did indeed rip back, however, and was able to use the slipped stitches on the edge of the heel flap to gauge where I was. Note: this is one of those times where the fluffy-floofy, loopy-doopy yarn that has kindly hidden any errors thus far was not my friend. I think we're OK, though.

Persephone may look like she just woke up, but she is really mentally counting rows for Mommy. Such a little helper...

I have placed rubber nubbin-thingies on the end of anything remotely likely to release stitches into the wild to live free with their own kind and am watching everything like a sheep-hawk. With any luck, I can at least make it through the heel and save any further mistakes for the foot portion of the sock. I just keep telling myself what I tell my students when they make a mistake that sends them into a spiral of self-pity and teacher-blame: "every mistake is a lesson learned; if you don't mess up every now and again, you'll never get any better."

Now I understand why they keep looking at me like that...

SA