F%#!

I've mentioned in the past my utter frustration with knitting instructions that read: "Work to correspond to left front, reversing all shaping." I mean, really. I'm paying for the damned pattern. Would it kill the designer to write out the directions for the right front? Does it really cost that much more to print an extra paragraph? Am I the only knitter on the planet who finds it confusing to change the ssk's to k2tog's and the "end of rows" to "beginning of rows", all the while keeping track of the number of rows and stitches and making sure to remember the "AND AT THE SAME TIME"'s?

I was planning to show you a Red Ruffles just about ready for its front edgings to be knitted on. I was working the post out in my head while whipping through the seams, considering pithy phrasings, imagining colorful expressions...when two inches from the bottom of the second side seam, something went awry.

I had already finished the right side, and it seamed together perfectly:

See that straight seam on the left, and the nice little curve on the right? That's how this cardigan is supposed to look. But as I reached the very bottom of the left side seam, the edges didn't match up. This seemed wrong to me, since I was careful about matching the seams, clamping them, and mattress stitching them up, but I figured I'd been distracted by one or more of the other inmates somewhere along the line and cheerfully pulled the seam to do it over.

Some time later, I reached the bottom two inches of the same seam again...and it still didn't match up. Now this time I was less than cheerful. I knew darned well I had matched the seams properly and sewn them accurately, and the other inmates were all in another room watching Spiderman. I pulled the seam partway out again and took another look.

This is the inside back:


See the straight edge on the right? That's where the side seam should be.

This is the left front:

See the nice curve on the left? That's the one that's supposed to be there. That one on the right? Not so much. And this is the result:

No way that seam is going to be straight. Ain't gonna happen. Because I somehow managed to knit curves into both sides of the bottom of this piece. And as this is a bottom up sweater worked in pieces, the only remedy is to take it apart, rip the entire left front, reknit it, and resew it to the rest of the cardigan.

Now, I would love to blame this little mishap on the instructions. I would love to heap invectives on the head of the designer for failing to write out the directions for both fronts individually. I would love to rant at the magazine editor for allowing such shoddy pattern writing. But the fact of the matter is...the front I screwed up is the one for which the directions are written out. The other one? The one that reads "work to correspond to left front, reversing all shaping"? That one I did perfectly.

F%#!

Comeuppance

Remember how, when you were in junior high, and one of the Mean Girls made fun of you, your mom would tell you, "Don't worry about it. What goes around comes around."? [At my junior high the Mean Girls were called the "socs"--short for "socials"--and their leader was a girl named Courtney Buffington (really!), who did her best to make my junior high school years a living hell. But I digress.] And even though it didn't help at all when your mom told you that, it turns out that it was true.

Two days ago I was snickering at the Yarn Harlot's tale of the elephant sock. I mean, how could you possibly not recognize that this thing was a disaster in the making? How could anyone be in such denial as to not realize that there was no way this was going to end up being a sock? If you haven't seen it yet, you seriously need to go check it out.

And then yesterday, I was giggling at Trek's failure to note that the neck shaping on her aran cardigan needed to happen simultaneously with the armhole shaping, especially since I had blogged about making the exact same error with the exact same pattern well before she made the mistake.

So I suppose I had it coming. What's wrong with this picture?

If you said, "Hmm, that lower left corner looks a little....odd," you are correct. It does look a little odd. A little Dali-esque, actually. [Not that I have anything against Dali and his melting clocks. I just don't really want to crochet one.] The thing is, it's been looking like this for a while now. And I kept thinking maybe there was something not quite right. It might have been the funny little wrinkle I kept getting at the corner when I tried to smooth it out. It might have been the way that my square didn't really look quite...square. It might have been the way that I seemed to be changing to a new round a little too often. But despite the nagging sensation that all was not well in crochet land, I kept going. Despite recognizing several times that it wasn't getting better with time, I kept going. Even last night, when I finally discovered what was causing this not-quite-squareness, I kept going.

This is what caused the problem:

See that bump on the corner? That bump is the start of a new round. Only one corner is supposed to have that bump, and when you reach it, you know you are starting a new round. If you look closely, though, you will notice that two of my corners have that bump:

That is a bad thing.

But not, I thought, bad enough to warrant ripping back 10 rounds. Doesn't sound like that much? Bear in mind that 10 rounds on a 42" square is more than it sounds like. Think "widest part of lace shawl" and you'll be in the ballpark.

So, as we've already established, I kept going. I fudged the bad corner. I figured, who's going to notice? I had not, at this point, laid the thing out to take a picture, so it wasn't until I did that this morning that I realized I had a much bigger problem and finally accepted there was no alternative to ripping.

So I did. I ripped and ripped and ripped. I ripped for a really, really long time. I ripped until the yarn ball I was winding was too big to hold in one hand and I had to brace it against my belly to hold it while I kept winding. Finally, I got to here:

That's it. That corner there is the culprit. And...

...ahhh. Now it's gone.

Now all I have to show for the past few days of marathon crochet is this:

That's about a 14" square.

Actually, that's not all I have to show for it. I also have this:

That, folks, is a 350 gram ball of bulky weight yarn. Three and a half skeins. Three days worth.

*sigh*

Cosmic Smack-Down

I knew I shouldn't have risked lace.

When the cast on couldn't discourage me, the ripping couldn't break my spirit, and the p5tog learned I was more persistent than previous evidence would indicate, the Knitting Goddess had to take a new approach. I discovered a whole new way to screw up lace.

I LOST IT!

Yep. I lost an entire shawl in progress, yarn and needles still attached. Somewhere between spinning group on Friday and sitting down to knit Saturday evening, it disappeared!

%&*$#@!

Oy.

I finished the first sleeve of Mossy last night.

I ripped out the first sleeve of Mossy today.

Although it turned out exactly as I had planned, I didn't like the finished product. Too narrow for the design. It really needs a more relaxed sleeve shape. So I'll give it another shot. Times like this, it's good to be knitting with aran weight. And top down. Definitely, top down.

Ripping My Heart Out

I did it. Fast, like a bandaid, so it wouldn't hurt. It did anyway.

Thank you all for the advice and support. I did email Cynthia (from the comments), only to discover that her peplum, which she thought was too big, was smaller than mine. By a lot.

Still, wanting to be sure, I took Deep Purple with me to my knitting group this morning, to get an unbiased opinion from knitters not emotionally invested in the project. They laughed. Out loud. It was suggested that it might make a good table skirt.

And in case you're still not convinced, I decided mid-rip that I really ought to lay it out flat and measure the thing, since it was off the needles anyway.

My dining room table seats eight comfortably; ten in a pinch. I could always use it as a table runner, I suppose.

I did, at least, think to take complete measurements of every part of the peplum before I ripped. I measured and noted and calculated. So I guess you could say I just made the world's largest gauge swatch.

I also discovered source of the problem. As I mentioned before, the gauge for the peplum is not given in the pattern, nor is the finished measurement of the bottom of the peplum. But there is a measurement on the schematic (in the wrong place, but there all the same) for the top of the peplum, where it joins the bodice. There is also a stitch count for the top of the peplum. If I were the sort of person who thought ahead in this way, I could have figured out the gauge for the peplum by comparing those two numbers before starting to knit. As I am not that sort of person, I only discovered this connection today. Taking those two numbers, the required gauge for the peplum works out to 7.88 stitches to the inch. This is in aran weight yarn. My gauge for the peplum in aran weight yarn on size 6 needles is 6.5 stitches to the inch. Over 428 stitches, that is a difference of 11.5 inches. Even if I had made the size small to begin with, there is no way my gauge would have given me a finished product that corresponded to the actual or perceived size of my body.

So the next time you wonder if gauge really matters, the answer is a resounding YES!

But I am a little miffed by the whole experience. The pattern, to be honest, sucks. I know; I don't like to criticize other people's creative work, either, but if I had paid for this, I would be royally peeved. (For those who don't know, this was a Vogue Knitting "cover pattern" bonus from their anniversary issue, and is available as a free download from the VK website.) But this pattern is a Debbie Bliss design, which I understand is a reprint from one of her books. If I had paid for a pattern book to get this, I would be outraged. The only gauge given is for the seed stitch part of the bodice, the schematic does not show measurements for several important parts, and some of the measurements that are given are clearly incorrect. But what really confuses me is how anyone could ever get the required gauge with aran weight yarn. 20 stitches and 30 rows in seed stitch is almost doable (although I had to use a size 5 needle to get close), but nearly 8 stitches to the inch for the cable section? Most of the successful finished projects I've seen on Ravelry used worsted weight yarn or lighter, not aran. And most of those were modified to make them smaller. So I am baffled as to what the designer had in mind with this one.

But at least I got "free yarn" out of the deal.