The Meaning of More

It's been one of those days.  When I woke up this morning and the hot water heater wasn't working, I knew I would have to make some adjustments.  Instead of diving into my scheduled work, I was tied up on the phone.  Now I'm stuck waiting for the repair guy to show up "later this afternoon" . . . whatever that means.  The reality of the situation is there's probably a broken part and it will have to be ordered and it's a holiday weekend and . . . Maybe we'll have hot water next week.

To take the edge off, in between phone calls and waiting I decided to get this new project up and running.

Even this was a challenge.  You know those instructions that say, "Repeat rows 1 and 2 x times more?"  This is my understanding of that instruction.

more = in addition to what you've already worked

For example if you've already worked rows 1 and 2 one time and the instruction says to repeat them 10 times more, that will be a total of 11 times or 22 rows.

This morning I was already a little stressed with the hot water situation and all, but I was determined to make the best of it with a little bonus knitting time.  I cast on and followed the first set of pattern instructions, but at the end of it my stitch count was off.  I had too many stitches.  I counted and recounted.  I did the math every which way.  No matter how I did it, I always came up with too many stitches.  Repeating rows 1 and 2 x times more gave me the wrong stitch count.

This pattern gives a row by row stitch count, so if I start out with the wrong count, chances are I'm going to be wrong for the whole project. Unless I make another mistake that inadvertently corrects the first mistake, but that's a terrible correction strategy. 

So I decided to work back from the stitch count I needed.  I ripped it all out and repeated rows 1 and 2 until I had the right stitch count.  I didn't do as many repeats as the pattern said, but my stitch count is right.  

This pattern is described as relatively mindless.  Now that I've worked out the kinks, maybe it will be.

My color inspiration for this last weekend of summer . . . 

All the blues.