Knitting by Memory

In my imagination I'm the sort of knitter who keeps a beautifully arranged notebook that includes every knitting project, always listing the needle size, making detailed (never cryptic) notes about little changes I make along the way, always including a little yarn sample and NEVER losing the ball band with all its critical info...


The truth is, I often knit on the go. A row here and there, or while my son is reading out loud to me from one of his readers, a few rows while I'm waiting on a student who is running late- that sort of thing. I do get a few evenings a week to knit for more than a few minutes at a time.

I could take a little notepad with me or something, but I just don't. I could even take a few minutes to type in a note or two into ravelry on my phone, but I just don't. I remember well enough to pick up where I left off as long as I do it in the next few days, but the only things I regularly mark are anything with a chart.

A word of warning: knitting by memory is one of those inadvisable things.

Like swimming with sharks or something.

Remember when I left the almost-done sock at home over our trip? But I had the yarn for sock #2 along and my bag of DPNs, so I went ahead and started sock #2. Not a problem, right?


Except that I was knitting from memory and I *surely* remembered that I was knitting on size 1 DPNs and I remembered *precisely* where I had started in the color repeat.


Except that when I got home sock #1 looked terribly different than sock #2 and I realized that I had started at the wrong color repeat (which at worst makes the socks fraternal- and I can live with that) but most egregiously had knit sock #2 on size 1 DPNs while sock #1 was knit on size 0 DPNs. I thought at first that the difference in size was because one was knit on metal needles and the other on bamboo because SURELY I would never use the wrong needle size. Of course, I didn't realize this difference until I had finished sock #2 on the size 1's Wednesday night and picked up sock #1.


If there is such a thing as a happy turn of events in this cautionary tale, it's that the finished sock #2 fit better than the not quite finished sock #1, so I actually ripped out less by ripping out the original sock. That counts as a happy ending right?

After a weekend of catch-up knitting (around packing, Ender's basketball practice, a birthday party for my nephew, church and the never-ending laundry....) I'm happy to say that I'm blissfully knitting as if this is sock #2 and not sock #1 version 2.

A girl can pretend, right?