Meaning in mistakes

So, the current knitting project I said I'd tell you about. Meet the tiny fox feet.

The pattern is deceptively simple. On some rows you make more stitches, which gives you the 'lumps', and on other rows you decrease lots of stitches, which gives the furrows between them. These increases and decreases act to 'bend' each row, so a straight line of colour becomes a wavy line. Pretty cool, if you're a massive knitting geek and that kind of thing floats your boat (that'd be me, then). It's not actually particularly complicated to knit - it just requires a bit of concentrated counting in places. This, it turns out (fairly predictably), is more difficult with a head cold. So today I made a counting error, which left me with more stitches than I should have had. But that didn't matter for the next row. It was only when I had some spare stitches at the end of the row after that when I realised that something wasn't right. Cue much concentrated counting and muttering to myself (key knitter traits) and undoing of one of the more complicated rows, before executing a slight bodge to hide the spare stitches and fix the problem. The point, lest you be dozing off with boredom, is this: ordinarily having to undo a row would be cause to bookmark a project for a month while I knitted something else. But I like the little tiny fox feet too much to do that. And it turns out that the mistake was worth making. In the process of undoing and redoing I have discovered more about how the pattern works, and found I love it even more as a result. Oh, and the bodge? You totally can't tell.