Knitting Stupidity.

Stupidity has made a little bird nest in my brain, and I have managed to utterly and blissfully misunderstand knitting instructions. Consequently, now, Weird Things are being done here to fix this.

I've misread the instructions for an overall stitch pattern for the front parts of the Cushing Isle cardigan. The instructions are for the overall pattern, and there's a knit stitch added before and after the pattern stitches in their *repeat everything between this* star brackets. A little below the eight lines of written-out instructions, it says "charted version at the end of the pattern, add selvedge stitches at start and end of row" and the subtitle for the section explains that this is the cabled check stitch pattern, multiple of four stitches plus two selvedge stitches.

And what did my brain make of it? I knit the pattern as written out (which included the two selvedge stitches, which means one at each end of the row) and added two selvedge stitches. At each end. So when I had finished with the right front, I had a total of six selvedge stitches... three at each side.



Which, very obvious to any sane knitting person who looked at the picture of the finished cardi at the front of the pattern pdf, is way too many.

I had wondered, inbetween, why so many plain stitches at the button band edge were asked for. I had also wondered why none of the plain stockinette edges were visible on the picture of the cardi. And only when the right front had been all finished and bound off and I started the second front part and re-read the pattern instructions, just to make sure I remembered correctly... it dawned on me. Like a ton of bricks. On speed.

So. Obviously, I was not happy with the result (I had sort of already bemoaned the stockinette strip while knitting, as it was apparent that this would change the appearance of the front). Obviously, as I'm also a lazy person, frogging the whole piece is not what I totally want to do (though I actually considered it, as the start of the neckline decreases also is a little early, but that's a totally different story, and it shows how much this misinterpretation irked me). However... I have a plain stockinette back for the sweater, so the side seam extra-wide stockinette selvedge does not touch me as much. As for the midline part, the overall pattern has a repeat of four stitches. I have two that are wrong... exactly half a repeat. You know what's coming, right?

Right?

Yes.



The needle stuck in diagonally holds the extra stitches freed up by the decrease maneuvers for the neckline, fourteen altogether (two are held with safety pins). The needle at the top holds the correct selvedge stitch, keeping it all together, and the freed live stitch from the bindoff. The needle at the bottom holds the two live stitches in the last row of the hem ribbing.

And now I'm slowly making my way back up.



Once I'm there, I will un-bind-off the rest of the shoulder seam and let down the two wrong stitches along the armhole edge, re-do those in pattern, and then I am all set. I don't mind having the side seam optics shifted by that scant centimetre as long as all the rest looks okay.

I'm still a little malcontent with myself for making such a blatantly stupid misreading error... but oh, well, it happens, and at least it's relatively easy to fix. In the future, I'll look (and think!) twice, though, when it is not totally and utterly clear whether the selvedge stitch count refers to each selvedge, or both selvedges added together, and whether these stitches are already in the description or not...