That is Why You Count

It’s been a lovely week weather wise. Down in town many of the flowering trees were in blown and lots of bulbs had made an appearance.

Thursday was really amazing down in Boulder, it was in the high 70s for temperatures (up on the mountain it was in the 60s) and I had a lovely walk at one of my favorite parks where I took the above photos. There had been warnings all week that a big snow storm was moving in this Friday, so I wanted to enjoy as much of the gorgeous weather as possible.

I had hoped to finish my Playing with Triangles Shawl in Lion Brand Vanna’s Choice worsted yarn today. It seemed a very good idea to have a warm shawl to wrap up in as the storm is supposed to stay with us until Tuesday. Fortunately the boys have a long weekend off from school, so at least we weren’t going to be driving up and down the mountain in the snow.

Friday morning I woke up to sunshine, but it was definitely colder than it had been Thursday morning. By early evening, we had 5 inches of snow. So the boys and I spent the day staying warm inside and watching shows on Netflix. I was crocheting on my shawl.

I had decided to make this shawl as large as my yarn stash would allow. I had 7 balls of the color I had chosen and had worked the body of the shawl for 52 rows using 6 balls and starting into the 7th ball. I was so happy to start on the border because I thought I was nearly finished with the shawl.

I was rocking along on the border and then I realized that I had a problem with my stitch count. According to my stitch pattern I had a single crochet stitch where the blue dot is, but my single crochet should have ended up where the first red dot is then I would have 3 V-stitches in the chain space where the red arch was with another single crochet in the next red dot.

I ended up counting my stitches and rows again to figure out if I had mis-counted my rows originally. But I had counted the rows correctly. Unfortunately I was on an even row, but I had an un-even number of V-stitches in the first side of my shawl. When working the body of this shawl each row should give you the same number of V-stitches along one side as the number of the row.  So I should have had 52 V-stitches along the side instead of the 53 I had. Somewhere I had added a stitch.

Now I had to find where I had messed up. I laid the shawl out on the surface of my bed and marked the center point of every 10th row. Then counted the V-stitches to either side until I found where I had messed up. Unfortunately I found it on the 21st row.

I had been crocheting along and slipped into working stacked instead of staggered V-stitches, then switched back to staggered. If I had been counting my V-stitches along the sides regularly I might have caught my mistake sooner.  I debated about if I was going to tear-out all the work I had crocheted on the shawl after the mistake. But I knew I would end up doing it.

I spent the rest of the afternoon pulling out my work and winding up the yarn. This is a photo of all the rewound yarn and what my work-in-progress looks like now. Maybe I’ll get it finished this weekend while we wait out the snow-storm. You’d better believe I’ll be counting my stitches at least every 10 rows to be sure I haven’t goofed again.

Sometimes even “expert” crocheters need a reminder that counting is important.