Disaster has struck!
(But to save you any anxiety, the situation has now been saved. Phew.)
I was knitting merrily away on the push-me-pull-you socks while watching The Professionals, when I noticed a bit of green from the variegated yarn on the red side. Oh noes! I had accidentally twisted my two yarns together about four rows back. Four rows isn't much to frog, but picking up the stitches again - alternating the two yarns, and on the wrong side - was not an option I was prepared to consider. I thought about just leaving it, and fixing it when the socks were finished and the right side was visible, but that would mean I couldn't separate them, impairing my ability to weave in the rest of the ends as I go, and making the knitting messier and the finishing task harder. I couldn't produce more than about 2cm of free yarn at the relevant spot, and am not at all sure of my ability to tie a secure knot after cutting such a short length.
After examining the problem, and discarding all the alternatives, I came up with a solution: I dropped the two guilty stitches (one on each sock) back down to the row before the twist, and held them out of the way with safety pins (which was a risk - I must get some of the coil-less variety). Then, forced by necessity to break the no-peeking-at-the-right-side rule, I un-interlaced a bunch of stitches either side, sewed in another length of yarn along the path of the twisted strand (on the red side, to make matching easier), and screwed up my courage to cut the yarn at a point where its path was duplicated, to give me enough spare yarn at the twist to tie a knot (fortunately, I remembered to untwist the yarn before tying the knot ;-)
Situation saved. And in some ways, I like having to fix this kind of mistake in my knitting - I enjoy thinking about the structure of the knitted fabric and working out what to change to make things work again.
(Following the spirit of the no-peeking rule I resisted the urge to take a picture of the bit of the right side which was briefly revealed. It looked nice, though!)
