Third time lucky

I decided last night, at way past my normal knitting hour, that I really ought to at least cast on for the tote, so that I could say that I started on April 1st. So off I trotted to find to cotton, and some needles, and I got myself cozy and cast on. I knitted two or three rows, and to be honest, it was hell. I've mainly been knitting socks recently, so the 14" long, 6mm needles seemed like tree trunks compared to my nice little 2.25mm dpns. And the cotton has no give, so the ssk stitches were such an effort. Never mind, I tried, that's good enough for me.

Fast forward to this morning, and instead of getting myself ready for work, I decided to undo last night's efforts, and try again with smaller needles. This seemed to work much better, and I got a few rows done before I really had to leave the house. All well and good, or so I thought.

So, fast forward again ( why doesn't real life have fast forward? ) to this evening, home from work and ready to knit some more. I'd been thinking about the technical side of the pattern during the day - the way that the different decreases should slant, how it might be better to think of the purl rows as the finishing of the pattern, rather than the start. I knitted a couple more rows, but when I got to the end of a k2tog row, I realised that I had a spare stitch. And in fact, after counting, I had 3 less stitches than I started with. After some scratching of the head, and counting the row several times over, I realised that I'd not been doing the yo between the last ssk and the single knit stitch on the ssk row, so I was in fact losing a stitch every 4th row. Rather than undoing back to my last 'safe' row, I decided to undo it all, and start again.

So start again I did. And I knitted. And I purled. And I knitted and purled some more. And finally, I came up with this:







By jove, I think she's got it! Now, only 20 inches more to knit, and then I can have the fun of the crochet joining, and the knitted on handle. I can only imagine what fun that's going to be.