Back to Square One: A Sock Drama

I keep reminding myself that there is no crying in knitting because it is, after all, not the end of the world if you make a careless mistake or, say, two weeks of careless knitting mistakes.  Those man socks … the pair that I am (was) knitting for my Honey … let's just say the adventure is gone and now it's just a matter of stubborn knitting to meet the deadline.

I'm not really sure what possessed me to knit all the way to the toe decreases before it occurred to me to have my Honey try them on, even under the guise of them being someone else's gift.  I'm not sure why I elected to follow someone else's pattern and then not check after the initial ribbing to see if I was getting gauge.  I'm not sure why I didn't double-check the CO math against the gauge.  But I will say this about a pair of socks that are now back to pre-cast on stage:  If we had a Yeti that needed a pair of thick, warm socks, they would have been smashing!

So it's back to the drawing board.  This time, before I ripped out 3 hours here, an entire Saturday afternoon of heels and 2 weeks there, I measured my gauge so that I could calculate a realistic cast on number for the next time I cast on, which really needs to be in about 3 minutes because I now have exactly 10 days to re-knit a pair of man socks.  The other pair on the needles is going to have to be ripped out, too.  Although I did use my brain enough to take down the cast on number by 8 stitches (1 inch, gauge-wise) on the other pair because I was using a less heavy yarn, on closer inspection it turns out that I'm still coming up with about 1.5 inches too much in the leg width (which will translate to a behemoth heel later on) and that's just not something I can decrease out. There are many expletives floating around in my brain at the moment that I won't share here, but the reality is that this is all my fault.  I was so focused on the deadline and my knitting schedule to hit the finish line with an record-setting amount of last-minute knitting done that I carelessly disregarded ALL of the rules of knitting.  Let that be a lesson to you.  Honor The Rules.

And the icing on the cake to all of this is that while removing the needles from the socks to rip them, one end of the fixed cable detached itself from a needle and now I'm down a pair of circs. Crap.