Tale of the Frog (with happy ending)

Work on my Katrina shell progresses, but I reached the midpoint of the back, where I repeat the lace stitch I had done at the bottom edge. Alas, my harried brain did not retain the new information, so I found myself doing it wrong, wrong, wrong. I lost count of how many times I did some or all of those five rows, frogged them, repositioned stitches, and tried again. The Katrina was starting to show the wear because while it's not a really "splitty" yarn, my lovely straights have great points, and sometimes I snagged the fibers a bit. I was actually considering cutting the yarn, throwing out the yards that were done and redone ragged, when I got a Brilliant Idea.

I don't get them often, so bear with me.

I would use different needles and different yarn to attempt the pattern as many times as needed until, voila, I figured. it. out.

So I grabbed a smaller set, some sport weight wool, and the instructions. Cast on ten stitches, started the pattern and got the same mistake--but wait! I'm not supposed to let the YOs go when I reach them, I'm supposed to knit them so that I regain the stitches I lost when I P2TOG the row before! [Picture light bulb coming to life with a faint gleam, which is all I give myself credit for at this point.] So I redid the little swatch and it started to actually work, and finally I was recreating the pattern I had so successfully done on the bottom edge of my tank just a week before.

[choirs of angels sing majestically; shafts of light slant downward from the storm clouds and wash over Stacie's face]

So I took up the real work and began to rework those rows, talking out loud to myself the whole time, and finally it worked.

Lessons learned:
1. Break away to a swatch when I'm struggling, rather than shred the real yarn and have to re-orient the stitches correctly time after time. I can't tell you how many times I "lost" a stitch in trying to rethread them on my needle and had to do emergency measures to catch it and reclaim it.
2. Follow the pattern directions. I skipped the part where it said, in plain English, Rows 3,4,5 purl across. I just purled once on Row 3 and then moved on to the pattern again. DUH. I can hear my mother saying, "Stacy, slow down and think about what you're doing."

Now I'm well into the last rows of the regular back, getting ready to begin decreases for the arm holes. I'll post a pic when I have the back done.

~Happy knitting!