Sunday, October 23, 2005

Clarity!!

Ahhhhh....(healing sigh)

Today I went hunting for some help on the Over the Knee Stockings from Handknit Holidays. I was having trouble with the decreasing because the pattern is written in a ridiculous fashion, but there's nothing online correction-wise because it's such a new book. I'll be calling Stewart, Tabori and Chang sometime this week I think - to make them aware of the mistake and see if they can find a way of sending me a list of corrections or something. If webspace wasn't so expensive I'd get off my ass and actually see about creating a site specifically to gather all the corrections for books out there. While I was at Purl in SoHo to check out the trunk show of items knit for Handknit Holidays, I grabbed someone to see if she could help me. I told her that the instructions were telling me to do two different things. I told her that by default, just by reading the instructions I can tell that they're wrong. She told me I should just try to do it, and that it will iron out when I try it. But honestly, the instructions made NO sense whatsoever. And while I really just wanted to tell her to shove it, I tried to think of the hot chocolate Jill and I shared earlier and calmly walked away.

Jill, Jill and I went to The Point instead (yeah, three Js...fun eh?). I spent some time moping, looking at the Vogue Knitting book that I want desperately in search of any kind of clue that would tell me I'm either stupid for not being able to understand the instructions, or brilliant for knowing that they're borked (yes, I just said "borked," what of it!?). I finally sequestered John enough to say "help!" And help he did!!! He sat with me for like twenty minutes looking at the pattern, reading it, doing it, and finally we decided that yes, the pattern really is borked. So I'm just doing a plain ssk and k2tog on either side of the pattern to decrease it.

An awesome dinner at Sammy's and a new pair of Nine West hooker boots later, and I found myself mystified by the ever elusive YO. After a bit of confusion and talking over Jill, she was able to break through my thick skull enough to actually teach me how a YO works - for this I was elated. Somehow, I thought that the actual knit stitch after the YO was part of the YO. In this I was, of course, wrong. Armed with the knowledge I have, I decided that once home, I should continue on with my valiant efforts. And then I was reminded that John told me I have cast on too many stitches. To be honest, I've spent too much time trying to figure out what's going on with the pattern to make them imperfect. I have thus decided that I need to frog and re-cast on the requisite 84 stitches and start over.

This is a good starting over, however. When I restart, I should be re-starting with all the knowledge I need in order to get these goddamn things done to make these perfect.

LATER UPDATE: I decided not to start over, but instead just to make notes and decrease as appropriate. Oh, and the pattern says that the last decreasing round should be on round 70, but since i started decreasing a bit early I guess, I'm going to make my 6th decrease on row 72. And there's no one to stop me! Mwahaha!!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very well explained. I feel your pain too. I managed to e-mail back and forth a bit w/ the designer of a certain knitty garment that I recently completed. And while she had some constructive feedback, she also fairly insulted me by somehow acknowledging that some detail in the directions was omitted, but in the same sentence added that it was SO minor that NO ONE had ever needed to bring it to her attention - because they just worked through it and it really wasn't a problem. Hmpf. SOME of us seek perfection and if a certain knitwear designer doesn't welcome the opportunity to make his/her pattern come closer to perfection, then tough shit. ok, off the soapbox. i can't wait to see the pattern and pic for these socks (though I want to call them stockings). This is too long for a blog comment.

Passionknitly said...

They're definately stockings...And you'll probably see one that's almost close to completion by the time I get down to DC!!