Try Try Try Again

I like to brag about being a fabulous knitter. I know, pride comes before the fall right? I should really keep my mouth shut. I still maintain that I'm a darn good knitter, however I am a terrible reader. I've been working on my RSC May socks since Friday when I got the yarn, and I've made very little progress. Julie was more than patient with me as I knit up the toe at her birthday party. I couldn't help myself. I mean, you've seen the yarn it's beautiful! I just had to start on it. I stopped knitting after the toe though, because that's where things get a little more complicated. Then we proceeded to party the night away, and we didn't stop until 4am. It was an awesome night of relaxed conversation and I'm glad the birthday girl enjoyed it.

The next morning I frogged the whole thing. I knew I'd made a mistake when working the toe, and I'd fudged it to just be done, but the next morning I wasn't happy with my decision. I couldn't even see where I'd messed up or fudged, but I really love this yarn so I wanted to do it right. I did work on Iza's present before I re-knit the toe. I have a little self control, just not much. This time the toe came out with the exactly perfect stitch count. I still don't know what I did wrong the first time, but at least I did it right the second time. Meanwhile I've made excellent progress on Iza's present. I hope to have pics of before and after assembly tonight, or tomorrow at the latest, so I'm over a week ahead of the deadline on this one.

But back to my knitting disaster. I've gone and knit the first 23 rounds of the foot pattern, and I know there's something wrong. Honestly I've known for quite a while. My sock just doesn't look like any of the other pictures that I've seen. I tried to pretend for the first 15 rounds that it was an optical illusion, or that the look would change after just a few more rounds. Isn't great how we can lie to ourselves and ourselves will totally go along with it, even though we have to know that it's a lie? Well, I finally stopped lying to myself, and decided that I was definitely doing something wrong again. After frowning into the computer monitor for a while I decided to pull out my pattern and read the stitch definitions for LTC and RTC. Yeah, I've been doing them completely backwards of the way they were written. I've put the left stitch on the right side and the right stitch on the left side.

That may all be greek to you, but in essence: I buggered it up because I fail at read. *sigh* again. Well, now that I know what I've done wrong it's time to try again. I've taken a picture of the failure in the hopes that soon I can compare it to success. (Disclaimer: It is a crappy iPhone pic that is neither in focus nor true to color. However, I plan to rip back before I can get to a real camera and take a better shot, so it is going to have to do.) In case you want to see what other people have gotten from the pattern check out Miri's sock and bit over here.