A disappointing afternoon

I was ready and eager to start on my next garment.  I have a knit radar pattern I like, I have the yarn, I had a spare few hours.  It was the perfect time.

I started off great.  The ribbing went well, the transfer to main bed went well, I set up the tuck patterning perfectly and the knit radar was working wonderfully. I glanced at the carriage and misinterpretated what I saw.  The lever was on tuck and to the left and opposite the 4 on the tension dial.  I misread it as the tension being on 4 and I wanted it to be 6.  I had only done a few rows in the tuck pattern so thought it wouldn't make too much difference to change the tension to 6.  So what did I do???? I moved the lever back to the centre so it was opposite the 6 and continued knitting.

Duh!  It was doing stockinette.  I was confused until I realised what I had done.

Oh well, no big deal, just unravel it and start again.  I wound it back onto the cone but did it too tightly and made it into a kingpin shape.

Oh well, no big deal until I tried knitting with it and it wouldn't unravel because of the bulge at the top.

Fortunately I had another cone so I set the new one up and started again.

This time the ribbing wasn't going well and when I dropped the main bed after transferring the stitches I could see that it had done it's weird thing that it does sometimes.

Oh well no big deal, just unravel it and start again.  I also resited the ribber.

I started again,  this time the rib went perfectly, the transfer to main bed went perfectly and it started knitting perfectly.

I was nearly up to the armhole shaping when I saw that something wasn't right with the pattern.  It had started about 5 rows down in the middle.  I thought that the knitting had caught on the gate pins but it wasn't that.  I guessed it was a dropped stitch so was not recoverable as it is tuck stitch. After i took it off i could see that was exactly what had happened.  It had dropped a stitch.  Thinking about it I think I should have hung weights all along and not just at the edges.  I still had the ribber cast on comb attached with weights on it but I think the knitting needed to be weighted too in the middle.  Will try that next time.

This time it was a big deal.  The afternoon had gone by and it was time for dinner.

Oh well, there's always tomorrow!  

I do think I am going to like using the knit radar.  Just have to up my inventory of patterns.