Damson: Catching Simple Mistakes

One of the best things about Damson is that it's such a simple yet elegant pattern. Because of this, there's a lot of very repetitive knitting. I tend to make most of my knitting mistakes on very easy patterns because I simply stop paying attention to what I'm doing. The two problems I've stumbled upon with this pattern are mismanaged yarn overs and keeping track of stitch counts.

When you work the yarn overs correctly, your shawl will radiate out from the cast on edge in a symmetrical manner. Makes perfect sense, right? Well, my first 20 rows or so looked a little more like this:

Why were my wedges uneven? Because my yarn overs were ending up to the left of my stitch markers instead of the right. It can be a bit difficult keeping yarn overs on the correct side of the stitch marker, but it's super important to be vigilant! On my second attempt, I erred on the side of caution and pulled my yarn overs a little tighter. This helped me keep them in the right place.

My second major problem was incredibly silly. I often lost track of which row I was on (despite keeping a tally on my pattern). In fact, I worked the entire first row of the lace section before I realized that I needed to do one more set of increases first. In case you haven't read that far ahead, let me tell you that there's a chart of stitch counts on page 3. Had I realized this, I would have been spared some tinking!

Thankfully, all of my small mistakes have been very easy to fix. I'm sailing through the pattern and am currently on row 98! Here's a peak at my progress.



I think I'll finish the pattern this weekend. Wish me luck!