Cardigan in Sirdar Country Style: Third pattern section completed and so is the back.

August 30, 2013 by Elaine 4 Comments

The back is finished

I actually finished this yesterday but with our internet running slower than a snail for the majority of the day, I wasn’t able to do this post! I’m very happy with the finished look of the panel, although it wasn’t without a couple of mishaps but, thankfully, the nature of the fern patter meant that I was able to spot my error almost immediately and only had a few stitches to pull back to make the correction.

The 16 row  lace pattern was easy to follow and the natural progression of the pattern soon became apparent. That’s what I like about these complicated looking patterns, they rarely are that complicated and by the time you get to row five or six, you get a feel for how the pattern shape is made and can almost do away with the pattern completely, to a degree and this is especially true once you have gone through the entire pattern panel once, it’s a case of sit back and knit until the next step of the instructions comes into play.

That said, this almost blaze attitude to a pattern can, in my experience, lead to silly errors creeping in and add a moments mental block into the mix and a goodly number of rows can be completed before you realise your mistake, resulting in a massive unpicking session to reach and rectify the error.

It helps if you work from the correct page!

After a particularly long and relaxing stint with the needles, I suddenly realised that I was in the ‘wrong’ place on the lace for what I thought was the next stitch (yfwd, slip1, knit1, psso which is yarn forward, slip a stitch onto your needle, knit the next one and then pass the slipped stitch over the knitted one). For you none knitters out there, the ‘yfwd’ effectively creates a new stitch and a hole in the knitting. This means that the stitch count on your needles has gone up by one and so to correct that, the next stitch is cast off with the ‘psso’ instruction in this case. See! Easy! Makes perfect sense 🙂

Anyway, I realised that the ‘hole’ was going to appear in the wrong place and so I worked my way back along the row, found where I had gone wrong, pull back the stitches to that point and did it again. And I mean did it again! I was still wrong! Aaagghhh!

So I repeated the process only to find that, once again, I was wrong! I couldn’t work it out at all. I checked the stitches from the start of the row to the point where the error was made and still I couldn’t see where the problem was …….. and then I saw it! In black and white! As I glanced back at the pattern booklet ……. ‘Front Left’!

Just before starting this row, I suffered what I can only describe as a mental block and wasn’t sure how this row started and so I picked up the pattern to double check, must have flipped it over and I was working from the third section of the front! Obviously, once I was working from the correct section of the booklet again, I soon corrected my work but when I got to the end of the row, I decided that I maybe needed to put it down for a while and start fresh later on.

I finally got the back finished yesterday afternoon and I cast on the ‘Left Front’ yesterday evening and made steady progress through the first pattern section before calling it a night. With half the number of stitches, the front should knit up much faster than the back but it does have some ‘in pattern’ shaping for the neck which may be a challenge.