Knitting and un-knitting

What with Mothers' Day, I was a bit busy over the weekend, entertaining the mothers, but I did get a bit of knitting done and I was doing quiet well...

Until I did my regular stitch count and discovered that I had a stitch too many - woops!

I couldn't see where I had gone wrong, so the only thing for it was to tink back to where the extra stitch had occurred.

Tinking is un-doing the knitting one stitch at a time, like this:

 Slip the left needle into the bottom of the last stitch

 

Slip the stitch off the right needle

 And pull the yarn through.

TINK is KNIT backwards, hence "tinking."

I had to tink 15 rows before I found the problem. I had accidentally omitted slipping the old stitch off at the end of making a new one, so the next row offered me two new stitch opportunities. Clearly I wasn't looking properly and took them!

All was going well then, almost to the end of that new row, when a knot (put in by the manufacturer, btw, not me!) came undone and gave me a hole!

I quickly re-tied the ends, but it was no good, I still had a hole in my knitting!

So I tinked another couple of rows(!) and deposited the loose end at the end of the row. 

I have been doing this with all my looses ends throughout the piece and knotting them together so that they are out of the way:

I'm now using a "life-line," which is a contrasting thread, woven through each stitch on a row which is known to be correct. This way, if I screw up again, I only have to undo back to the red line (and then I could take it all off the needles and rip it back, if I want to.)

But I'm not going to go wrong again. I'm re-counting and moving the life line every few rows. It is a bit of overkill really for a simple project. Usually such techniques are only employed in complicated patterns which are prone to go wrong, but I think I need it for a while. I definitely don't want to tink 17 rows again! I'll remove it when I'm confident i'm getting it right.