How Quickly They Grow Up

Here's my little Eleanor, at just over two weeks since she was first cast on. Already at seven skeins of yarn. *Tear* She and I spent a very vibrant, sunny fall Sunday together on the patio the other day. She's just getting longer right before my eyes...


Like a proud mother, I laid her out on the patio next to the flowers to take another progress pic; the ultrasound of knitting:
And that's when I noticed one square was laying kind of oddly...almost twisted. As you see here:

But this yarn is wool, right? With the magic of blocking, it seemed as if it would lay out all right. I tied on ball number eight and knit on. Three rows later, I realized that what I had *thought* was a pesky square was really a pretty hefty error. Somehow I had managed to add another diagonal "column" of squares (starting at that odd blue one), which would make Eleanor wider on the second half and bug the heck out of me. As you can see in this photo...the two outside lines cover columns going from one end of the wrap to the other, as they should. That one in the middle somehow, due to a brain fart, snuck its way in. Let me repeat: I discovered this after I had added three more rows of squares to what you see in this photo. But I couldn't just leave that error there to stare me in the face and make me feel like a failure every time I wore this shawl. I'd be scorned at by knitters everywhere. You know what I did next, much to the horror of my family who sat there watching, claiming that you could hardly notice it, and that they would have just left it and kept going. Hmmph. By the way, I'd like to give a shot out to my great uncle Mike's "lady friend," who was kind enough to help me, the traumatized knitter, by winding my yarn as I was frogging it. Way to be a pillar of strength in this time of knitterly disaster. When all frogging was done, I had ripped out well over one skein of yarn.

But we're past that now.

I'm happy to say little Eleanor has made a full recovery and is back to where she was before this unfortunate accident...actually, a whole row further, as of tonight. She'll be a Lady before we know it!