Counting-counting-COUNTING

Posted on September 09, 2006 by knittingpatterns4you | 4 Comments

So I'm sitting here knitting away (on yet another new project I can't even believe it myself, it's all Leslie's fault) and I have to split this yoke for the body/armholes, right? And I have been planning my stitch counts all along, so I have a pretty good idea how many stitches will go to the armholes and how many will make up the body. I have an oh-so-technical method of figuring this stuff out:

my sketch

Note all the scibbles and cross-outs.

I knew I had to work 28 body stitches, then bind off 30 armhole stitches, then do the same on the other side. Instead of doing the simple, logical thing (subtracting to see how many stitches go across the back), I took the lazy approach and decide to just knit "to where it seems right" and count from the other end of the row, counting the 28 body stitches and the 30 armhole stitches. I'm quite proud of my would-be shortcut and knit along happily across the back stitches, then when I think I got far enough I start counting from the other side. Then I start binding off. Then I knit the remaining body stitches. THEN, for good measure, I count all my stitches. And I'm off by 3 stitches.

So I recount. I checked each section 4 times and I couldn't find why my count was off: the sections match eachother but the total isn't what it should be, which is what I wrote on my schematic. As I'm recounting I decide that maybe the two glasses of wine I had with dinner (all-you-can-eat mussles and french fries from La Tour on the eastside, awesome) are to blame, so I decide to write the numbers down for each section so I can look at them to try to make sense of this. And they still don't add up right.

The nagging voice inside my head is insisting that it must be because of my little "shortcut," even though I still can't figure out what's gone wrong. So I decide I better figure out how many stitches are actually supposed to go across the back and use that count to do the bind off row again. So I tink back half the row, go back to my piece of paper and look for the magic number.

And it turns out I added the numbers wrong at the beginning. So my row was fine, but the piece of paper was wrong.

Don't you hate it when there are mistakes in your pattern!?!? Especially when you wrote it yourself?

(and lest we forget, I have a BS in Finance)

Posted in knitting


4 Responses

leslie nusblatt
leslie nusblatt

September 13, 2006

so I am so anxious to know…how many bowls of mussels did you eat and how is the sweater???

Devorah
Devorah

September 09, 2006

These things happen. Glad you are back on track!

Shana
Shana

September 09, 2006

Just blame it on Leslie ;-)

leslie
leslie

September 13, 2006

you can’t blame me…we are two of the same creatures….completely obsessed….i have been checking to see the progress…I’m coming in today to see you I can’t wait!

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