Harumph

I successfully finished another pair of socks for my mother just before Mother's Day - with three days to spare, a new noteworthy record.  As it is May and Christmas (and all its associated sock knitting, a problem I have created for myself, sadly) is over six months away, I decided now was the perfect time to make myself a pair of socks and to try a new pattern.  A few months ago I got my hands on Alice Yu's Socktopus and eagerly paged through it, loving almost all of the patterns (some are beyond my capacity.)  So I started her pattern Vorticity on Monday, and started knitting.  Here's what it looks like this morning:

But that's not a sock, you say.  Indeed it is not.  I have started and frogged this sock pattern twice this week.  I started the pattern and switched from the cuff and started the leg chart, then examined the sock and decided it would be enormous and slouchy, not what I wanted.  So I frogged it (rrrrriiiip it back, for those of you who read and are not knitters), got smaller needles and started again.  This time, I knit three repeats of the leg chart and then took a hard look at it and noticed it was getting smaller the further I knit - I had cast on 70 stitches and after 63 rows (I know, I KNOW!) there were only 40 stitches.  That was a sock unlikely to slip over my foot, and when I tried to frog back to the cuff, I had an enormous amount of trouble picking up the k2p2 pattern.  Since it was only an inch long cuff, I decided to just start again.  I am determined to get this to look as it should.

On an online message board I am on, people speak in reverent tones about Ravelry, so last night I joined, searched for the board related to this pattern, and found over 300 messages from people who are working on this pattern, including some pattern corrections that mean I will be able to fix this sock and make it look like the picture in the book, something I never would have figured out on my own.

Third time is the charm.  Right?  RIGHT?