A visit to the frog pond

There will be no pictures in this post to enliven my sad tale or to document the wreckage. Suffice it to say I have been making serious backwards progress lately and feel the need to 'fess up to it, even if I can't bring myself to photograph it. But there is some major frogging goin' on here.

First, TW and I have faced up to the fact that his vest is too long. While it fits in every other conceivable direction or dimension, it is simply longer than really looks right on a guy. So it means taking off the buttons, frogging the neckband, undoing the lower part of the side seams, picking out the cast-on, frogging the pieces from the bottom up, then reknitting the lower bands, sewing the side seams back up, reknitting the button bands, and sewing the buttons back on. If all goes well no one will even notice that it wasn't knit that way to start with. Let's not discuss what can happen if it doesn't go well. The good news is that I now know for sure I have enough yarn.

Secondly, as I was merrily knitting away on the ferry last night, I started having the gnawing thought that the armhole shaping on the left front of the Hex Coat was looking a little, well, odd. I am using a lighter weight yarn than called for in the pattern and had refigured the pattern to suit the gauge I had come up with. While my gauge is different than the pattern, it's not a huge difference (4.8 st per inch instead of 4.25), so when I noticed that I was needing to decrease a lot of stitches to get to the appropriate shoulder width I started hearing those nagging little voices in my ear, hinting that perhaps something was amiss.

Now, to put this in context, I have already realized that I had messed up on the stitch sequence along the zig-zag of the front edge. For some reason I had simply not been able to figure out what was going on in the instructions, with the moss stitch, increases, decreases, etc. My mind sometimes descends into a dyslexic fog when trying to work through someone else's directions, and this was definitely one of those times. It wasn't until I looked at Ravelry and saw pictures of other people's finished coats that I realized that the front edges were supposed to have 3 stockinette stitches along that selvedge, instead of moss stitch all the way to the edge. Why I hadn't been able to figure that out on my own I don't know, but it did make the decreases/increases much cleaner looking and set off the row of hexagons along the edge very nicely. So I already had the niggling thought that I wanted to start over to make the front look like it was intended, which I also liked better than what I had done, but with the 1st front done to the armhole I decided I didn't want to frog that much moss stitch.

And then I noticed the size of that armhole. So I looked back at the schematic for the coat, and puzzled over what the problem could be. And then I suddenly realized what I had done. The schematic included 2 sets of dimensions for the fronts - one for the moss stitch sections only, and one for the fronts with the hexagons knitted on. When I reworked the pattern I used the wrong set of dimensions, and therefore had made the front a full 3 1/2 inches wider than it was supposed to be. I couldn't leave that, as it would make for a very oddly sized sweater to say the least, and there was no way to fix it any other way then to ....rippit, rippit, rippit. Can you hear the frogs sing?