&$@^%#($#&$
From the title of this post you can probaby guess that I don't exactly have good news to report on the knitting front. Last Monday I joined Heather huddled in the corner cursing and muttering under my breath. I had been chugging along on the hourglass sweater and had the good fortune to have Monday off from work. My vacation agenda was set: I could finish the hourglass on Monday and wear it to work on Tuesday. Perfect. Merrily I knit along, entranced (blinded) by the idea of wearing my lovely sweater with the lovely yarn, ignoring any signs that all was not going according to plan. I finished the yoke and decided to try it on before sewing down the neckline's hem. Trying to get my arms into the sleeves made it clear that I had strayed from the sweater of my dreams. I was so focused on finishing the sweater, I had conveniently forgotten to follow the pattern corrections made in the errata. Yes, the &*#@$% errata. I had dutifully reviewed it when I cast on, but by the time I made it to the yoke, I had visions of an hourglass dancing in my head, not technical pattern adjustments. For those of you who are not intimately acquainted with the hourglass errata, you should know that it corrects the raglan sleeve shaping. Without it you get a severely skewed sleeve effect, as demonstrted on my very own hourglass. Rather than splitting the raglan decreases on either side of my stitch markers, I had done all the decreases to the left of the markers. The effect was not pretty. 
Note the wandering stitch markers making their wayward clockwise journey around my shoulders. 
At first glance, the left sleeve shaping just looks a little over-eager in its sloping slant. 
But then the right sleeve shows the shaping at its worst. After the muttering and cursing mentioned above, and some much appreciated commiserating with Heather about our sweater woes, I came to terms with the ugly truth... I have no one to blame but myself. The main reason I was so mad was because I KNOW BETTER. Checking the pattern errata is a token lesson of Knitting 101. Not only that, I blatantly refused to acknowledge any accumulated knitting wisdom and intuition that would have indicated some serious problems unfolding. Instead, I blissfully chose to ignore all signs of pending doom and committed an act of knitting hubris, the classic case of counting chickens before they are hatched. Knitting has a maddening habit of putting cocky knitters in their place. With my mini-Monday vacation reduced to a pile of frogged yarn, I returned to work on Tuesday with the knowledge that I wouldn't have time to revisit the hourglass until the weekend. One week later, I am back at it; the Packers lousy showing on Monday night football is providing the perfect medium to tackle Round 2 of the yoke (who knew you could make a pun out of knitting and football?!). I'm down but not out, with a pending transit strike, I could be facing lots of knitting time.
