In Which the Pirate Has a Knot.

There I was, knitting the short-row heel on my Quick and Easy Sock, when – a knot! Not just any knot, but one followed by a color change! Not just any color change, but one that was out of sequence! And not only that, but the color sequence reversed afterwards!

I cut the yarn at the knot and re-wound the rest of the yarn so that the stripes would appear in proper order, then went back to knitting the heel. About halfway through it I realized I was going to be off by one or two rows, which would throw off the striping from this sock to the next.

So I figure I have three choices:

a) ignore it and knit on
b) add extra of that stripe to the heel of the second sock
c) rip back and match the yarn lengths up better

Choice A, ignore it, will be the easiest to do now, but the mismatched stripes will annoy me for the life of the socks. So much for choice A.

Choice B will save me some time now, but it will be fiddly later and difficult to get the exact lengths right.

Choice C, on the other hand, will be fiddly now but save me time later, and I think I’d rather save time on the heel of the second sock. By that time I will be ready for the socks to be *done already* and might not have the patience to futz around with getting just the right amount of one particular color into a heel. Besides, it seems like the right thing to do. A mistake is made now; fix it now. Other than the annoyance of having to rip back, it should be pretty easy to get the end of the one with the knot lined up with the end of the —

Oh no. What if the heel stripe wasn’t full-length? What if the knot wasn’t at the end of its color change? Okay, I can do this. I’ll rip back to the beginning of the color change and measure it. But that won’t work if it’s not full length, will it. HA! I will measure it against the length of the next color change! Yeah! Could this BE more fiddly, on something that’s supposed to be a Quick and Easy Sock?