My socks would not win contests.

Probably 50% of my socks have some official "mistake" or another in either the gussets or the toe - a missed decrease made on the next round, or sometimes even a "hey, I seem to have knit the entire foot with 65 stitches instead of 64, so I'll just bury a decrease on the sole and do the same thing on the second one" type of deal. (Real example!)

I feel kind of bad about it, but not enough to tink or, heaven forbid, frog. I will fix mistakes if I catch them soon enough, or if they're noticeable to my eye, which, judging by posts where knitters show pictures and say things like my god, this is horrible, but don't mark where the mistakes are, and I sit there for a few minutes squinting and tilting my head and looking for textual clues about what could possibly be wrong... is not good.

I am okay with following the spirit of the directions if not precisely the counts and numbers and actual directions and such. Especially for socks. For some reason it's different for any other thing I make.

Perhaps this is because of the way I handle my sockyarn buying and knitting, which is this: I am allowed to have enough yarn for one pair of socks on deck. Until I finish a pair of socks, I will not buy another skein. The consequence of this is that I knit socks as fast as I possibly can. Another consequence of this is that I have enough money to buy food, and not, say, an apartment insulated with sockyarn. Yet another frustrating consequence of this is that I miss every damn sockyarn skein that I want to buy from Etsy.

As long as we're talking about my knitting deficiencies, I got hold of the pattern for the Shetland Triangle shawl (which really I shouldn't even be thinking about until I've knit two (2) baby blankets) from the library and cannot understand the pattern at all. No comprendo. I have such questions as: If you start at the long edge, why do you cast on 2 stitches, then increase a few? Where do those other couple hundred come from? How does one read a lace chart? Clearly I need to study up a bit.

So, Hedera #1 is done, toed and grafted, and too short for my foot. Ufserud is clearly too long and just getting longer. I haven't gathered the willpower to start back in on Baby Dots. And I am being entirely outwitted by a shawl pattern.