firecat

I think what you're talking about is slightly different. As long as I have the physical pieces in front of me, I can put stuff together fine. But it's definitely true that we all have little brain lacunae.

One of the other things I do for lace is type up the lace pattern with boxes on the left to check off the row as I start it. Especially these days, I don't have much time to knit, and am unlikely to be able to do a whole repeat before I have to stop. Once I have the pattern down (which may take over a foot of knitting), then I just put a stitch marker through a hole in my needle-sizer to mark the rows.