Backstitch

I am normally not especially challenged by the knitting instruction "Join in the round, being careful not to twist."  I check my loop, I twist the cast on innards all towards the middle of the circle because I mostly knit inside out when I'm working in the round, everything is fine. 

And then along comes a global pandemic and the Honey cowl and I've ended up an inch into a cowl and then realized it's actually a mobius at least four times. As none of this is deadline knitting, I've been ripping back and starting over but it's slightly frustrating, especially as I'm staring Stash Dash in the face and every yard counts. 

Should I be working instead on one of the other works in progress piled up around Chez Hedgehog which is much nearer completion? Probably -- but I wound up this yellow Unicorn Horn colorway from Deep Dyed Yarns (the still base) and well... ripped back a couple hours of knitting yesterday. 

As I finished the cast on yet again and made the tidy circle, I thought about how yarn continues to move even as I'm working with it and one concern has always been reaching the end of the row and did I twist it? I'm suspicious, though I cannot prove, that it's this first row that is tripping me up because I'm blithely knitting along and not looking at the fact that the join has twisted around on me. 

How then to prevent that? Ah-ha! A technique from sewing. I could backstitch.

You can see I was about ten stitches in when this occurred to me -- and yes, it's short-rowing when in knitting, but for this it is a backstitch -- I flipped the project and went back over the stitchmarker and a few stitches into the end of the round. Then back to the usual side and off I go. A slightly more manual version of pressing the reverse lever on my sewing machine. 

Whether this will work remains to be seen. But I am feeling more confident and I'm hopeful. This one small bump will easily roll into the edge of the cowl and certainly won't impact the warm snuggliness of the cowl next winter. 

The question now is do I have enough knittable-Zooms today that I could catch up to where I was when I had to rip it out yesterday. IASSIST business meeting, here I come...