Downsides and Upsides

Yesterday, while working on the Shetland Shawl, I had an aha moment.  

The pattern is a simple pinecone pattern.  a single pattern row repeated 4 times, purl back between and then the same row offset, repeated 4 times and purled back between.  It is the sort of pattern work that the Shetland women usually did.  Simple, but producing something beautiful.  Easy to hold in your head and do between all the tasks of the day.  

There is a certain sort of pleasure even in its unblocked state.  Its knitting up faster than I thought.  (Shetland patterns always feel like they knit up fast to me).  According to my rough calculations, I only need a couple more repeats to make the square at the heart of this shawl.  

So when I tell you that I ripped out an entire repeat because I was weirded out by missing stitches when I really just forgot that I was on the first row of a section and was setting up the offset, and that when I was trying to do a decrease section, what I really needed to do was an increase section...

A Ha. Arghhhhhhh.  There was no need to rip and reknit on Friday. There were no mystically missing stitches.   I caught myself doing the same thing yesterday, thinking there was an error when there was not.  Thankfully, it was the middle of the afternoon and I looked a little deeper. 

And that is why things usually get set aside when there is an error:  so I can be certain that there really is an error rather than it is just time to put my sleepy head to bed.  Sigh.

On the upside, I might just finish the center today.