Saturday, September 27, 2008

Frustrating

I'm getting pretty good at following knitting patterns (*knock wood* don't want to irk the knitting gods, you know), but the pattern for this cabled fingerless mitt has me frustrated. There are 4 different cable rows, which isn't bad, and the full cable panel pattern is 12 rows, also not bad, but then there are 4 rows combining the rib and cable panel, followed by a line saying, "Beg with row 5 of cable panel, patt 22 more rows, ending with row 10 of cable panel." So I'm assuming that means repeat the 4 rows set above, melding them with the 12 cable panel rows from over on the side of the page. (However, counting from row 1, row 22 gets you to row 10 of the cable panel, knitting 22 more rows takes you to row 26 overall and row 2 of the cable panel. I stopped at row 22.) Since 12 is a multiple of 4 I managed to work my way through that. Then I got to the "Shape thumb gusset" part. Each and every row is marked "Next row", no number, no indication of which cable row should be a part of it. Now the first section ended with row 10 of the cable panel. Does that mean that I start with row 11? I assume so, since I want the cable panel to look right. So that's what I did, but I can't for the life of me keep it straight which cable row goes with which "next" row. So I'm sitting at the computer, transcribing the pattern row by row, writing every stitch out, knitting as I go. It's a very slow way to knit a mitt. And do you want to know what's even better? The other mitt is a mirror image since there's only one cable panel and it must go on the back of the hand, not the palm. I get to do this backwards. Yikes.

2 comments:

Ann said...

You can do it!

rochard said...

It's not your fault--that's a really poorly written pattern. Just eyeball it and use common sense. It's like those patterns that take you through a complex pattern reduction when you're doing a cardigan front, then say, "do left side, reversing all shaping." LOL