The Owl Saga

I'm making an Owlet. This is slightly insane because I've only made one other knit sweater (which had horrible mistakes) and I've never done any cabling. But I'm doing it.

I've had minor issues the whole time. The sweater looks huge and will probably have to wait to be worn for an entire year. I had to redo one sleeve when I got ahead of myself. But then this weekend I made the HUGE mistake.

I was watching a Scream marathon with the mommies of the giftee, so I didn't want to show the pattern. I would sneak glimpses of it to make sure I was doing things right. I finished the second sleeve during Scream 1. By Scream 2 I was connecting the sleeves to the body & feeling pretty good about myself. During (the horrendously awful) Scream 3 I started the short rows on the back. Then, as per the pattern, I switched to my smaller needles and.... wait... start the ribbing? That didn't make any sense. Where are the owls??

The instruction "Here come the owls! Follow the chart for 19 rows!" is in bold at the top of a page. But it's the only line above a huge photo, so when I snuck a peek at my pattern and stuffed it back in my bag before the mommies could see I totally looked past it to the decrease rows. When I got home I seriously considered frogging the entire sweater, but it's Comfy & it tends to shed.. so I frogged only back to the main body. Only...

(Click to enlarge)

I ripped back an extra row in the front of the sweater somehow, so I had this long loop of yarn connected to each armpit. Afraid to further screw things up I decided to try to work from here.

You can see here, on the right you have the yarn I'm supposed to be working the next row with, but on the left in the same stitch is the yarn for the row I shouldn't have ripped out! I have no idea if what I did is right, but here was my process:

Knit one with left side yarn

slip stitch back to left needle

knit one with right side yarn

repeat across until I got to the end of the accidentally ripped row

It was fairly easy. I'm not sure it saved me any time, but it felt safer than ripping back another half row when clearly I'd already screwed up.

I'm on to the cables now and it's not too bad. Hopefully I'll have a final product to show before the week is out!