Apparently Vogue Knitting is notorious for having a lot of mistakes in their patterns. I didn’t know this, and I know I’ve knit Vogue patterns before and don’t remember having problems. And I would remember if I had THIS MANY GOD DAMN PROBLEMS with a pattern.

Damn Sweater

As you can see, I’ve battled and have almost won. If you follow me on twitter you might have seen my *%$%@% filled tweeting while working through this pattern. It’s. Just. Wrong. In so many places.

Last week I shared my struggles with the front shaping, and while there has to be schematic issues with the front shaping, I’m not using the yarn the pattern calls for and even though my gauge is on and the issues I was having were REALLY bad, human error could have been a factor. In my most generous moments, I can see that it might maybe have something to do with me.

HOWEVER, when I hit the sleeves I noticed that the decrease instruction is just plain missing a part! The SSKP dec should indicate that you need to slip the stitch back to the RH needle to finish the dec. You don’t want to knit that stitch again, but the pattern never tells you to slip it back over.

... damn sweater

THEN I got to the front right inset, and there is just no way around the fact that it’s just screwed. First of all, my right neck inset turned out to be the LEFT NECK INSET, which could have been my own error somewhere because I was so confused by the increasing. Row 4 is NOT an increase row at all. Row 5 is the increase row and you increase 2 sts each Row 5. Couldn’t get that whole K1b thing, so I ended up just knitting like normal. Because I had to adjust my decreases in the front piece to get that to work out, I knew I’d have to adjust my increases for the front neck inset, so I ended up pretty much just repeating rows 4 and 5 to match my front piece to get 29 sts. I decreased them back down in the same manner. THEN trying to make a matching inset for the other side was a nightmare.

Once I got through that I thought the worst had to be over. Then I read the button hole row, which reads from the pattern like this exactly: [K1 st, bind off 2 sts] 3 times, k to end. There are 60 sts for the button band. And, just to remind everyone, this is what the sweater is suppose to look like.

Check Out Those Buttons

I ended up [K15, BO2] 3 times, K to end, starting at the neck line on the RS. SERIOUSLY VOGUE DO YOU NOT EMPLOY A TECH EDITOR?!

ANOTHER annoying thing about all the stitches you are suppose to pick up throughout the pattern is that it doesn’t tell you which side to start with, so when it says to knit 5 rows, then the next row is supposed to be a right side row, I was always off. I picked up and knit the stitches on the right side, so I guess this is the wrong thing to do, too.

I’ve got some seaming and some major blocking to do to finish this bitch up. It might take me MONTHS to forget all this pattern bullshit and enjoy wearing this sweater, but I’m going to wear the hell out of it IN SPITE OF IT! SPITE SPITE!

And I couldn’t have gotten this far without Laura. She is knitting this god forsaken sweater, too, and has helped me so much when I couldn’t figure things out. I would not have gotten through the inset panel without her. I’m cracking a beer tonight for you, girl!

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