Project Talk: Seriously, WTF?

I consider myself an experience knitter. After all, I've been doing this awhile. However, believe me, I still make mistakes. Mostly the normal, run of the mill knitting errors, not reading the pattern properly, dropping a stitch, purling when I should be knitting, the normal stuff. But, every once in awhile, I make the sort of mistake that makes me sit back and say, "WTF?"

I did one of those today.

I was on hold on a phone call, so like any good knitter, I put the phone on speaker, set it aside and picked up some knitting. First, I grabbed my slippers, which have taken priority over everything else since chilly October weather has now arrived in Wisconsin. After a couple stitches, I figured that this pattern involved counting and short rows. Not the best for knitting I may need to put down at any moment (or be working on into the latter half of this century, given how being on hold usually goes).

Instead, I grab my mythos cardigan, where I currently knitting a long block of stockinette stitch. So I happily knit away until it was time for me to finish my phone call and set it down midrow.

Underwear or Uterus? You decide.

Later, I decided it would be best to finish the row, so I picked it back up and knitted to the end of the row. I held up the sweater to look at the progress, and ponder why I had so much faith that something that resembles either a giant pair of gray underpants or a really big knitted uterus would eventually turn out to be something pretty.

And that's when I saw it. In the middle of the last row I knit, there were two pieces of yarn dangling from two stitches right next to each other. It looked kind of like I had joined another piece of yarn at that point, but I hadn't.

For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what I might have done. I traced both pieces of yarn to see where they ended up.  One went back to the ball of yarn and the other connected to the end of the working yarn at the end of the row.

Close up of the mistake.

There was only one possible explanation. For some reason, somehow when I picked up the knitting to continue the row, I left a length of yarn dangling. I have no idea how or why I would have done it. The important part was that I had found the root of the problem, I was able to fix it.

The solution was to tink back to the mistake and reknit the remainder of the row properly. It is all fixed now, but I'm still left wondering how on earth I actually managed to do it. After all these years, knitting can still be a mystery.