Help! I've lost a stitch!

Hi. I’m brand new with a burning question! I’m working on a baby blanket that has a new stitch for me. I’ve never done increases or decreases before, and I’m loving the effect that the K2tog and YO produces. It’s beautiful! Since it’s new to me, I’ve been very careful about counting stitches and following the pattern exactly. The problem I’m encountering is that I’m coming up 1 stitch short at the end of every set of rows. I count and recount and cannot find the mistake.

Here’s the pattern: starting row is 138 stitches
6 rows K
(K6, K2tog 3times, YO 6 times, K2tog 6 times, repeat * to *,K2tog 3 times, K6
K across
K6, P across, K6)
repeat ( to )
6 rows K

The pattern row works out just fine, then I K across then count. There is ALWAYS a stitch short. I have been adding a stitch to make up every time it happens, but it makes my edges look awful. The only thing I can think of is that I decreased the pattern by 2 stitches on each end because I wanted a thinner edge. Would that effect the pattern enough to cause this? I don’t want to start over with the exact pattern - the baby’s coming soon and I don’t have time for that. What do I do?!

Make sure you haven’t missed one of the YOs in the YO, k6 part. It’s real easy to forget one. When you count after the pattern row, instead of counting, name the stitches - k6, k2tog, k2tog, k2tog, O, k, O, k, O k, O, k, (etc) k2tog, k2tog… sometimes that helps you find where you goofed.

Yeah, I thought about that, so I started counting after EVERY set of YO, K2tog, saying outloud, “Yarn over 1, 2, 3 . . ., Knit together 1, 2, 3 . . .” I know I’m not dropping a stitch while doing that row. At first I thought I MUST have been. But it happened EVERY TIME, no matter how careful and how many times I counted as I went.

The stitch is known as the feather and fan pattern. I used it to knit a baby blanket recently and I used stitch markers after every repeat. I found that the repeat was18 stitches. So invest in some stitch markers , they can help to see where you are losing a stitch.

Then the only thing to do is put stitch markers between the pattern repeats.

Do you think that maybe you are dropping a YO on the purl row? i know that i often find it difficult to purl into a YO and it can easily be missed.