(Knitting) Marathon

I still cannot really believe I was able to make a really great Sunday dinner for my family and knit for about six hours yesterday. With the help of afternoon baseball of network television and staying up late into the night, the hours added up.

The time was not spent without frustrations. I was trusting to my written instructions and hoping everything would work out properly even when I could not see how. I followed the directions to the letter, and I still had to begin the first shoulder strap several times. I am so, so, so incredibly thankful for lifelines! I kept inadvertently twisting the stitches when I used the circular needle the instructions called for. Twice I caught my error before I had finished five or six rows. Finally, the third time was different.

Or was it?

There are 70 rows on the shoulder strap. Somewhere around row 62 I wanted to show Rick my progress and I discovered I had done it again. I had made a mobius shoulder. Is there anything more useless? And there was nothing I could do but curse my luck, rip the rows, and begin again.

And one more thing. I put the circular needle back in my bag and knitted the strap again with straight needles. This time it was quicker and easier, seeing how familiar I was with the pattern after all those rows. Here is the properly constructed shoulder.
This morning I surprised myself with being awake and alert at 6:30 a.m. That does not happen when I go to bed at a reasonable hour. But I stayed up until 2 am to finish that troublesome shoulder, and this morning I'm ready to take on the second one. And conquer it the first time. With straight needles.Now that one shoulder is joined and the other is stretched out on needles instead of bunched on stitch holders it is beginning to actually look like a sweater. I'm still wondering why the instruction specify using a 34-inch long size US 7 circular needle. It was much simpler on the straight needles.