D'Oh!

Dear Kathy Zimmerman, despite never actually having criticized your pattern and never blaming you for my inability to knit the Bazic’s sleeves, I feel the need to apologize. Would a little self-flagellation be enough to atone for my last post? I would offer to knit a few things for charity, but that wouldn’t be painful enough because as the saying goes, stupidity should hurt. It really should and not just to punish people for being stupid, but to warn them that, yes, you are about to enter the stupid zone, so please, turn back now before it’s too late. After all, pain does tell us that it’s really not very healthy to touch a hot stove, so why shouldn’t it be there to warn us that we’re about to do something we will probably regret and/or cause us public humiliation? (Ehem, as in blogging about said stupidity before realizing just how dense you really are.)

But I digress. I thought I had put enough effort into deciphering your instructions. I spent hours thinking about just how to work the sleeve increases into the pattern. I mapped them out in Excel, I knit and re-knit and still I wasn’t happy with the result. Then I decided to read the pattern again. I did that and still I was confused. I went back to thinking, improvising, knitting and again was baffled. I couldn’t imagine that you wouldn’t have mentioned it if it were going to be this difficult. Then, suddenly, in a flash of “OMG I am so stupid I should be jailed” illumination, I realized that I am my own worst enemy. In my bid to be a smarty-pants and avoid sewing up the sleeves, I knit them in the round, even though your pattern says, knit flat. Looking at the work in my hands, I was looking at a piece of round work and trying to make those increases somehow fit perfectly between the first and last pattern repeat in every row. Needless to say, this doesn’t work. They aren’t going to fit perfectly. Ever. Never ever even. I needed to be working these increases into the pattern as if the sleeve were flat. As soon as I figured that little gem out, I realized that I had been thinking too far with all of my concentric pattern diddling (at one point I’d even thought about changing the pattern completely!). So Kathy, in that instant, I realized that your pattern was so simple any child could have done it without blinking and that I should be hauled up in front of the knitting inquisition where I should possibly have my all of my needles revoked. Like I said, I would apologize for having blamed you, but I never really did. From the beginning I figured I was missing something, and I was. Oh boy was I! (possibly a few million brain cells). Still, I’m sorry anyway.

I am now working the increases into the pattern like you told me to Kathy and the results are lovely. They no longer look like a train wreck of the worst kind, but like a pattern that was meant to be.

In the immortal words of Homer Simpson, “D’oh!”