The Perils of Christmas Knitting

I found the perfect colorway for a pair of gloves for Rocket to match her neon winter jacket. This has been a difficult task since she's been around more often than I expected with more than a touch of her first real winter cold and a day out of school.  So there I was, knitting away at a frenzied pace on a pair of secret gloves, sitting by an afternoon fire, thinking about turning on a bit of Christmas music. I was through the cuffs and just working my way around the front of the second glove toward the start of the thumb gusset when I realized (gasp!!) that the second glove was not counting out correctly.  In shock and dismay, I counted again. How could this be?! When I say that it was not counting out correctly, I don't mean not counting out correctly as in I was off by a stitch or two.  I mean, I was off by two glove sizes, meaning that I had one small glove and one large glove on the needles!  How in the name of all things knitterly could that have happened!?!

Yes, this colorway really is that bright!

After much swearing and desperate re-counting, there was only one thing to do: dive into the frog pond.  Okay, so it was only a measly 35 rows that needed to be re-knit, which normally would not be that great of a hardship, but, even if you forget that Christmas morning is 15 days away and that I still have another pair of gloves to finish, 3 hats, and 8.5 dish cloths to whip out, there is one peril of knitting, particularly occurring during the Christmas knitting insanity  season that one cannot overcome: the striping doesn't match on the second go-around.  Nope, not even a little bit.  It was pretty dang perfect the first time through but, because the knitting gods have a sick sense of humor, especially regarding all holiday knitting, the second time, no matter how carefully planned, will not stripe the same way.  NOT AT ALL!

The other thing that irks me is that I could have had the hands finished to the finger starting point today had I not had to spend my 1.5 hours of knitting time re-knitting the second cuff.  Even Nature is  picking up on my mood, as the sun has disappeared behind some rather threatening clouds and has kept this up through the whole of my knitting and the writing of this post.  I have, however, managed to get back to where I was in the pattern before the delusions of knitting mastery were shattered.

Gotta' go make up for lost time, so ho, ho, ho and happy knitting!