A Greek Tragedy

Well, it's defintely a Monday morning. And I was right that the gods would remind me of my place.

Here is the first half of Ysolda's Garter Mittens, knitted in a couple of hours yesterday afternoon and a delightful pattern to follow:

Aren't they pretty? And seamless and cleverly constructed and I was really rather chuffed about the whole effort. What fools we humans be.

Now, to complete said mittens requires grafting garter stitch, which I have never attempted before (you can probably see where this is going). Following some handy online tutorials, I thought I had mastered the basic technique. However. Although I succeeded in grafting every stitch, I didn't pull the whole thing tight as I went along (because I am a complete idiot). Attempting to smoothly pull the yarn through at the end was a disaster, leaving me with big loops in some places and tight bunching in others. Going along and doing it an inch at a time proved impossible. Resigning myself to undoing the grafting and simply starting all over again landed me neatly at catastrophe:

The problem is not losing the last couple of rows - I can just knit those again - it's losing stitches from what was a provisional cast on at the beginning. I guess technically, because they're live stitches, I could go back and knit the opening rows again as well. But the whole thing is becoming such a tangled mess (Rowan Felted Tweed is not a yarn sympathetic to my predicament) and stitches are dropping in all directions that I'd quite like to just set fire to it at this point.

So I have shouted and cursed and threatened inanimate objects and am left with a mitten that refuses to cooperate.

Time for a deep breath and a cup of tea before I start all over again from the beginning.

The ancient Greeks knew their stuff. Hubris. It'll get you every time.