Yarn Overs Are Not Make One Increases

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Sometimes I’m sad that I’m not that great at knitting.

Case in point: A while back, I started some gray mittens. I did the ribbing for the wrist and then gave up because the instructions started to get detailed and I didn’t have time to sit and work through things like “K 7, M1L, K2, M1R, K7, M1R, K2” and variations thereof. Tonight, though, I was diligently avoiding homework on the computer and thought, hell, if I can avoid homework on the computer, I may as well avoid it off the computer and do something productive, so I started back up on the mittens.

I made it through a few rows of that nonsense stuff about making one stitch left slanted and right slanted when all of a sudden I realized that I had some obvious holes in my mitten. Like, HOLES holes. As if I had skipped stitches somehow.

After pondering it for a bit and employing some clever methods of deduction, I realized that I had not, in fact, been making one left or making one right, I had been doing YARN OVERS. Yarn overs, when first put on the needle, may look somewhat similar to these make one thingies but LET ME TELL YOU they are not the same thing, and will give you delightful holes in your knitting that look like you have skipped a stitch. They can be used beautifully in lace knitting and other patterns to make decorative stitches, but they are exactly not what you want to do in the middle of a mitten. Mittens are just not mittens if they have accidental holes in them.

After figuring out what went wrong, I died a little inside and ripped out all the rows I had just accomplished. I managed to rip them out and put the needle back in okay, and re-do them properly with minor issues. I suspect there might still be a hole lurking in there somewhere, but I can’t figure out if it was something I did or whether the knitting just sits funny. I’m hoping to remedy it with some blocking later, but who knows? Knitting is a comedy of errors with me.

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