Persistent Knitter

I have finished all the charts for the body of Hardangervidda. This doesn’t mean I’m done though - there is still some block ribbing and a small stripe at the shoulder. Since I decided to do a neck steek I wanted to make sure I understood how the front & back neck decreases should proceed. The pattern has you restart your round at the neck,where I’ve just left the beginning of the round at the side.

So I’m reading the pattern and totally confused for a bit. Then I realize that you are supposed to be working back and forth starting at one neck edge and ending at another neck edge. Fine, I adjust my head and figure out that if I do it how I plan to, I will end up with the same number of stitches they say to after the block ribbing section: 225. Yay, right?

Wrong.

I will now have 39 stitches on each front shoulder. That means I should somehow end up with 39 shoulder stitches for the back after casting off for the neck on the back, right? *sigh*. After redoing the calculations 2 times, I end up with 49 on each back shoulder! 39 != 49 in my book.

There is part of the pattern that says:
Working each side of the body separately, cont C OFF every other R at back neck edge, 1 st twice (88 sts)

I don’t know what the heck that stupid "twice" word is there for before the stitch count, but if I ignore it, I can come up with 88 stitches total for the front and back shoulder combined. You would think that somehow you’d have 44 stitches for front and 44 for back? Well, if I go with the 39 stitches for the front that I previously came up with, then I’ve got 49 on the back - so WHERE did I go wrong?

Ignoring their horribly written decrease schedule in the pattern, Let’s assume that they want the neck hole to take up approx 1/3 of the stitches across the body. There are 147 stitches across the back and front (before any decreases) so if you divide that by 3, you’d want 49 stitches for each shoulder, and 49 stitches for the neck. It even divides evenly! They have 49 stitches for the back neck if you are making an XL, but I’m not, I’m doing the M, which has 45.

So I take a step back and realize that I counted the #$^%@%$#$!^%@^% stitches on the back wrong (on the chart even!) and I only have one hundred THIRTY seven stitches not one hundred and FOURTY seven stitches.

::hang head in embarassment::

I’ll get back to you when I’ve redone everything, but I think it’ll work out now. :)

And I promise pictures soon too!