June 20th Started with the swatches today… we’ll see what works best.

June 27th One week into this… I accomplished a lot during my long weekend: the back is finished and I’m about halfway done with the front. At this rate, I may need a new project for my week off!

June 29th Can you hear the sound of the crashing elation?

I’m a little frustrated… I’ve made it to the front neckline, which introduces decreases into the cables by the v-neck edge… “No problem,” I’m thinking.

The directions say that I’m supposed to “slip 2 st to cn, hold in front (or back, depending on the direction of the cable), knit one from left needle & one from cable needle together - twice; decreasing two stitches.

Okay……

Unless I’m missing something, that’s four stitches worked and decreased to two. Problem is, there are six that I’m supposed to work and decrease to four. I checked the pattern’s stitch count, counted the little squares a bunch of times on the chart… Nope, six stitches. What the hell am I supposed to do with the other two here?

If I try slipping the two to the cable needle, k2 (like you would with a regular cable), then knit one from the left needle and one from the cn together, it looks fine on the right side but wonky on the left… at any rate, they’re not symmetrical cables.

I spent about four hours looking for errata on this pattern from Interweave… I already caught the error on this pattern they have listed on their website so no go: It’s not listed.

Not a very good site, by the way… I had to find a link to their errata from another site because searching Interweave only pointed me to a book I could buy to fix mistakes, but nothing about mistakes in their books!

I’ve gotten around this whole thing by doing the k2tog’s as instructed (one from the cn with one from the left needle x2) and then just knitting the last two of the right and the first two of the left neck edges (left and right as they appear facing me).

The cables that result look very similar to the honeycomb pattern but aren’t as deep on the neck edges: instead of knitting 2 stitches out of order, it’s more like 1/1 & 1/1… but at least they look the same on both sides of the collar. I’ll post pictures when I get the chance.

I’ll also have a smooth stockinette edge to work with when I pick up stitches for the collar, so it may be an improvement. Thankfully, there are only ten of these in the whole pattern. I’m just hoping they don’t look sad once this is blocked.

Apart from that, I’m really loving this pattern. I keep running my hand over the textures… it’s very tactile. The yarn is easy to work with and my new Knitpicks Zephyrs are nice and pointy; much easier to use than my other interchangeable (Denise) set… And with a $10 discount, they were quite reasonable at $39.99! Score!

July 8th Beer and knitting… what a great way to spend summer vacation! I finally finished this and couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. It’s the first time my seaming came out beautifully.