I really enjoy the yarn love challenge that currently takes place on Instagram and some 'prompts' for sure make me smile. Today it is all about 'mistakes' and ahem, yep, that's a subject I could tell you lots about... but then, mistakes are there to be made and learnt from, don't you think? I think I've 'tried' almost every mistake a knitter can make: from shrinking (and actually felting) my fave sock in a cashmere blend in the washing machine, to accidentally pulling out needles from a lace shawl. And it's bad when it happens, but usually it doesn't take long until I can laugh about it.
Mistakes that I work into my projects are different though. Once I've noticed a mistake there's a good chance I rip back, even when others tell me they don't see the mistake at all. Unless it is something that I can tell myself is just a design element, like with the socks below.

Yarn and pattern came in a sock club a couple of years ago, and I only noticed that there was a mistake on the instep in the printed pattern, when I had finished the first sock. And since it was a toe-up sock... I decided against frogging and just repeated the mistake on sock number 2. It's hard to tell when you don't know it and in this case I'm fine with a 'personal design element', because the socks went into my sock drawer anyhway.
But mistakes in stuff I knit as a gift or (even worse) as a sample for publication? Hm... If there is any way to fix it, I'll do. Like with the socks I knit for my friend Laurel last year. They were my holiday project and yes, I might have been distracted a lot... Only when they were finished I saw that the socks had non matching cuffs...

And they were a gift, and acutally even a special one because it's the pattern I designed for Laurel, so...

... without hesitation I detached the cuff and picked up the now live leg stitches. I didn't knit the cuff onto the live stitches, since that way I would have needed to bind off the cuff and it would for sure look have different than the other sock. So, on a second set of needles I knit a new cuff, and...

... grafted the new cuff to the leg. Easy-peasy and happy Mone. :)
You can't tell that I tampered with the cuff, can you?

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