Revenge of the Ladders

I’m a couple of days into my heart to heart socks and I’m getting completely disheartened with how they are turning out.

First for some reason there is numerous mistakes in my 2x2 ribs on both socks, which is extremely difficult to get wrong. Should I stop watching tv while working on the socks? There’s a gaping hole in one of the ribs and I can’t understand how it formed. I guess that hole can be darned in but the mistakes in the cuff are too far down for me to bother attempting to repair them.

Finally I have two beautiful ladders running down the side of each sock. All the more saddening is that I chose to do them on 2 circs to precisely avoid this problem. True if I had used dpns I ran the risk of having 3 or 4 ladders, but on my previous projects, even if ladders occurred they weren’t that noticeable. Oddly enough the ladders are on the left side of each sock only, what I’m doing differently there I can’t really imagine.

I’m going to try various techniques to remove them on my future rows. I’ve already been drawing the yarn very tight between needles, so tight that my muscles ached, but that apparently is not working. There may be some more strategies to try.

As for the already existing ladders, I believe Elizabeth Zimmerman recommended using a crochet hook to run a column of stitches up the ladder and placing the extra stitch on the needle and do a k2tog on the next row. I don’t want to mess up the project further but since I won’t like these enormous ladders anyway, I’m going to bravely spend tonight trying to repair the ladders and the hole in the cuffs before continuing on my project.

Probably it’s something that should be advocated more frequently – if there’s something you don’t like about a project and there’s something you can do about it, why not try to fix it immediately. If it works, you can continue on much more happily. If it doesn’t, well, chuck it up to experience, there’ll always be the next project that is waiting to get done just right