Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Roundabout Leaf Tank

The Elann Pegasus arrived in the mail this afternoon, so I immediately swatched it to see if it would work better than the Katia Jet. It's a lovely yarn, very squashy, with a good "crunch" and incredible shine from the rayon content. It is much lighter and drapier than the Katia, so I'm pleased. I'll upload pictures as soon as my camera batteries decide they're done recharging.

Unfortunately, beautiful though the yarn is, I'm getting 20 stitches to the inch on #7 needles rather than the pattern's called-for 18. I went up to #8 needles, and got the same gauge. Since the fabric is already pretty loose on #7s, I decided to go with it, and just add two stitches to the width of the strip as it winds around and around.

Speaking of the strip, I cast on immediately after finishing my gauge calculations, and discovered a rather glaring error in the instructions. This is in addition to the errors already revealed in the errata on the knitalong blog.

You see, in the picture, the knitted strip appears to be a field of stockinette bordered by two lines of faggoting and a couple of edge stitches. The problem is that the directions listed do not produce that at all. The holes on the left side of the strip line up in classic faggoting, but the ones on the right side just make two wonky lines of holes with a zig-zag stitch in between. To make the knitted strip appear as it does in the photo of the finished garment, the pattern should read like this for both the border and the regular strip sections:

Row 1 (RS) K3, yo, ssk, k15, yo, ssk, k2.

This should make the holes line up in the correct manner. I haven't gotten any further than this in the knitting, and I probably won't do any more on it until we're headed to Brazil, but I'll keep track of any more errors I spot along the way. I really wish that the patterns in this book had been test-knit. It's such a beautiful book, and the patterns are so unique, that it seems a great shame that there are so many errors. Everywhere I go on the web, it seems, the first comment I read about the book is that it is riddled with problems.

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