The wayward crochet fail.

Sometime in the restful days after Christmas, but before the New Year, I started crocheting a new shawl. The pattern I used was called "Clapochet" by Crochet Kitten.    It's a rectangular shawl that is worked on the diagonal.

Using a pretty, variegated turquoise yarn, I started out in the corner:

Each row got bigger and bigger, until I reached the opposite corner, and then the number of stitches remained the same:

I was stopping to count stitches at the end of each row to be sure I was on track, until eventually I got the pattern memorized and just continued on my merry way.  After working on it for a few nights, it seemed to me that the rows were taking longer and longer to complete, so I took a tape measure and laid it out on the floor to measure.  This is what I had:

???

What the heck happened here?  Somehow I began increasing the stitches along that bottom edge with each row!  I still do not understand how this happened.  I was well into my third skein of yarn when I realized my error.

I thought about ripping out just back to where I started to stray from the pattern, but I was so annoyed with myself that I decided to pull the whole thing out.  That left me with 3 balls of yarn where I used to have 3 pull skeins.

Fortunately for me, my daughter just happened to have given me a yarn bowl for Christmas.

A yarn bowl  is a bowl with a swirly curve cut into it.  You put your yarn in the bowl, thread your leading strand into the curved cutout, and then rotate the bowl 180 degrees away from you as you work.  The ball of yarn spins around in the bowl when you pull and keeps it from rolling out onto the floor.

I decided on a new pattern for this yarn, called the Basket Stitch Scarf by Mary Griffin, and I'm about half way done on a new shawl.

I call this photo Still Life with Yarn Bowl.