We all make mistakes

The other day, I made accidental parkin.

See, it wasn't going to be parkin at all. It was originally going to be date and oat energy balls with ginger. I took 200 g of chopped dates and boiled them up with about 200 ml of water to make a paste, to which I added about 50 g of blackstrap molasses (I have no idea in what way this differs from treacle; all I know is it contains a lot of iron and, crucially, it is not very sweet). Then I tipped that lot into a bowl with 200 g of fine oatmeal and 100 g of sugar... whoops, really not sweet enough despite the dates, make that 200 g of sugar. (When I say "sugar", just assume I mean the unrefined sort. It has so much more depth of flavour than white or even ordinary brown.) And 30 g of chia seeds, because I wanted it to bind together nicely. And a couple of teaspoonfuls of ground ginger. Well... a shake of ginger. A very good shake of ginger. So probably two extremely heaped teaspoonfuls. I like my ginger to make its presence felt.

I mixed all that together, expecting to get a dough, but it ended up more like a batter. I could have added more oats, but I strongly suspected that if I added enough to get it mouldable I'd be eating energy balls for about the next month. So instead I lined a couple of silicone cake moulds, stirred in a level teaspoonful of bicarb and a splash of lemon juice (I think the molasses is fairly acidic, but I gave it a little help just in case), stuck it in the air fryer for half an hour at 150 C, and redesignated it as parkin. Best mistake I've ever made in the kitchen. It's bloomin' delicious.

The knitting mistakes in the feature photo were rather less happy. They're not easy to spot, but once you have spotted them you can't unsee them. Of course, I make mistakes when cabling all the time (anyone who tells you they don't is either lying or possessed of a truly superhuman ability to concentrate), but normally I spot them straight away, or at least within two or three rows/rounds, and can then either fix them immediately or ladder back and repair them. Both of these, sadly, were the exceptions. I didn't spot them till it was far too late to ladder back.

What I normally do when this happens is to stitch over it in a way that imitates knitting; I think there's a technical name for that. I have no idea what it is. The results are at least an improvement, but they're never really very satisfactory. So this time I decided I was going to do something different. My plan was to stitch a length of yarn in, wrap it round a cable needle, and then literally just knit in a new tiny piece of cable over the top of the error.

OK. Let's see how I did.

I started by sewing my two loops in place round the cable needle. It was at this point that I realised I'd need another needle to knit with (well, duh!), so I took out the finest needle tip I possess that wasn't already in use.

I just needed those two tiny little rows; and, given the scale, they weren't going to have room to curl at the edges, so I knew I wouldn't have to anchor them there. I just had to sew them in at the top. You can see the results in the next photo.

I am, on the whole, fairly satisfied. It's not perfect, but it could be a great deal worse... and I do think it beats standard overstitching. If not by very much.

Of course, the unattainable ideal is not to make cabling mistakes at all; the possibly-attainable ideal is to avoid getting distracted, so that you do at least notice them in time to ladder back. In my defence I was still in a fair bit of pain when these particular mistakes happened, and while it didn't directly affect my knitting because I don't use my upper arms at all when I knit and I didn't get any referred pain below elbow level, it was still messing with my concentration in general.

On which note, I'm happy to report that a) I am now pretty much totally pain-free, and b) you can no longer tell which eye it was that swelled up on Saturday. So I have made a full set of grommets for tomorrow's netting class, and, as promised, if you're interested, you can download Mr Holdgate's wonderful netting book right here. (I had planned to upload it directly to this page, but for some reason I can't do so; I'll have another go in the next relevant post.) I have also, incidentally, made a couple more pairs of bead earrings, and these may well become another post at some point, because bead earrings are the bee's knees. I've got a pair of them in at the moment.

Oh, and also I can now do chunky/super-chunky yarn. I mislaid another cable needle the other day (I do try not to do that, obviously, but now and again it happens), and I didn't have a spare in that size, so I had to order a new box of three, and while I was doing that I noticed something I'd never seen before. I have been wanting KnitPro needle tips in extra large sizes for several years, but the largest I'd been able to get was 8 mm. Lo and behold, they had a set of 9 mm, 10 mm, and 12 mm tips. I'm going to be making a super-chunky slipover (not yet, of course! It's hardly the season.)

So now I get to make really big mistakes...