A friend from church is finally having her first baby. She’s in her 40s, and is absolutely thrilled. This yarn will look fabulous with her baby’s sweet Italian complexion.

This pattern hurts my brain. First off, it doesn’t tell you to knit the rows in a linear fashion, but instead talks about what you should do for rows 1 and 3, and then talks about rows 2 and 4. It does it throughout the pattern, but the way, which is very disconcerting and rather inconvenient. Especially when it is late at night and you are watching a movie so you might not be reading ahead.

Secondly, this pattern requires that you cast on 5 separate times for each of the individual petals. However, it does not tell you to break the yarn after you finish your first petal, or any of the petals, for that matter, and it was only by reading through other people’s disgruntled blogs and forum posts about how many freaking ends they had to weave in when they were finished (the number is 14 - oh god shoot me now) that I was able to suss out what exactly the pattern wanted me to do.

By the way - this pattern is inordinately unhelpful because it does not give a nice game plan at the beginning to outline how you will be knitting the bib. This is what it tells you: “Sweeten up baby’s mealtime, at least until the creamed spinach starts to fly, with this pretty petal bib. It’s shaped with short-rows and fastens with an I-cord tie. And more important - it’s machine washable, so cleanup’s a breeze!”

Is this a pattern or an advertisement? You don’t know what yarn I’m using - my yarn could be totally not machine washable. Also, it would have been nice to have been forewarned about the multiple cast-ons and yarn breaks and wraps, etc. And let’s not even get into the fact that even though the pattern tells you to use sportweight yarn, the Ravelry database says DK weight, and the actual weight of the sample yarn is worsted. Ugh.

Excuse me, I need to go cast-on and knit another petal.

I despise this pattern. And it’s short rows. And the wrapped stitches (the instructions for those didn’t make sense at all until I went online and looked up a different way of doing it). Plus, my stitches are uneven or something, because when I went to p3tog (yes, purling three stitches together) the purls ended up smack-dab in the center of a petal, when the photos clearly shows they are supposed to be along the seams between the petals. So, I’m kinda making it up as I go along, altering the number of stitches to ensure the purls are in the right places.

Let’s not even talk about how awful this yarn is that I am working with. It’s nearly as bad as the time I knit with Naturally Caron Spa. This is going to be a disaster. Why did I want to make such a hard gift?

The applied I-cord was difficult because again, the instructions weren’t very clear. For example, it would have been nice to have been told I was doing an applied I-cord, or at least have had instructions in the back of the book. As it was, I again had trouble visualizing which needles I was supposed to be holding and exactly what I was accomplishing until I read through other people’s projects, found out what kind of I-cord I was doing, and watched a couple videos online. Also, Ravelry users saved the day again, by concisely explaining what should have been in the book all along.

All in all, my tenacity was the only thing that kept this project from falling into my endless pile of WIPs. The baby was born the day I cast on and I finished early Sunday morning, just in time to take it to church and hand it off to a relative for a gift. Huzzah!

Now that it is done and blocked I have a strange fondness for this bib. However, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t hell on wheels to make - just that I like the finished product. And I kind of want to make another one…