This week's challenges...

In the grand plan of de-stashing (or as I like to call it, yarnmaggedon), I’ve cast on a something in a sock yarn.  I think it’s going to end up as a shawl/scarf type thing, but whichever it is, it’ll be colourful.  It’s based on the Gallatin scarf pattern (Ravelry link), just without the rows of stockingette and reverse stockingette.  I may do ribs when it gets to near the end.  By that point, I may well have given up the ghost and do something else instead.  I really don’t want to think about how many stitches I’ll be casting off, or even which cast off I’m going to have to do or how much yarn it’s going to take when I get there.

Anyway, head down in my 2.25mms and yarn on the train this week, I realised that I was at the antepenultimate station to home, just as I’d started the next row.  Looking down, my first thought was ‘how many stitches’ (124, as it turned out), closely followed by ‘how am I going to get this done before I get home’.  

The penultimate station home, and I was only a third of the way through the row (or at least it felt that way).  So I put my head down and sprinted – or whatever the knitting equivalent is.  Luckily with that many stitches, it was easy to get into a rhythm; YO, k2tog, k2 etc.   (It’s a pretty basic pattern.  I don’t need to insult anyone’s intelligence by repeating it).

Everything was going well until I had to pull out more yarn, just as we were coming in to the station.  Had it not been for that, I would have got to the end of the row before getting to the end of the train journey.  Every Olympian knows the ‘if only’ and that was mine.  If only I’d had enough loose yarn to get to the end without having to give a yank.  If it wasn’t for that delay, I would have completed and arrived on the platform triumphant.

When we finally got to the station, I left the train with bag over my shoulder, coat in one hand, knitting in the other.  There were a grand total of eight stitches on the needle; so near and yet so far.

(dramatic reconstruction) 

It's perfectly normal to be the last person off the platform, because you've just got the last of the row to complete - right ?

The following day, I was knitting at work, explaining how easy the pattern is about ten seconds before realising I was out by a stitch.  One.  Freaking.  Stitch.

Husband had a look at it, as, in his words: "I'm anal about numbers".

He found where he thought the problem was and I tried to tink back the row...

Only somehow the yarn got tangled at the end of a row, I dropped a stitch and it all went a bit Orange Juice; I had to rip it up and start again.  I'm trying to convince myself that it's all a learning process, and at least now I have fewer stitches on the needles, knitting between train stations is a lot easier.